Skiing Down the Triple Black Diamond of Wall Street

An interesting thing happened back in the beginning of September, just a few short weeks ago. After years of hemming and hawing, I finally took the plunge and invested money in the stock market. I had been reticent for years to get in for fear of losing my ass. I don't know much of anything about the market. I never took a class, never found the Wall Street Journal interesting, didn't really take a liking to the movie "Wall Street", didn't raise Gordon Gecko up as a messiah of monetary proportions. I was more of a "spender" than a saver. I was content with a savings account and didn't feel the need to throw my hard earned cash into something that could fluctuate everyday. I have always been a "live for the moment" kind of person.

So in early September, with a new wife and a new house and my sales at work screeching to a sudden halt, I decided that this would be a good time to jump into the market. Stocks had been falling slowly for months, new interest rate cuts were supposed to help the economy grow. I knew getting into the market on a down swing would give me the best opportunity to get rich faster, or at least pad my non-existent retirement fund. Surely early September was a good time to put a little in and hope I bought the next Google or youtube.

You see, I was always a late bloomer. I am a Taurus, and by nature, I am stubborn, thoughtful and wait oh so long to pull the trigger on my ideas. I watched all my friends and co-workers over the past 15 years dump mega-bucks into mutual funds and IRAs and commodities. I did not do that. I had a mutual fund once. I put in about 5 grand over two years. I closed that account in 2005, paid the penalty and walked away. It took too much time, I thought. I would much rather put my money into a savings account. I was berated for being so short sighted. The Market! That's where the money is!

So, here I was, putting quite a bit less than $4000.00 into the market in early September because I had a "feeling". My gut and brain converged on a single point in time. I felt that now was the time. I invested in alternative energy stocks, mostly, with a few standards to keep me honest--Toyota, Apple, Chevron and Exxon(hey, people still buy gas, right? Nothing wrong with buying stocks you think might be around for a decade or four.) I thought I was ahead of the curve, especially when the market began to collapse and I lost approximately $25 the first week and was actually up $67 at the end of week two. I explained to everyone that would listen that I was invincible. I had stumbled into a surefire money maker by accident, or my pyschic intuition. I invested in mostly alternative energy companies that had just received massive tax breaks to pump money into their businesses and into the market as well. I was a fucking genius! Take that, you Harvard educated suits! I, John Murray, who never read an Economics textbook or took a marketing class, was making you look bad! All Hail Me!

So after the market closed just above 8000 points on Friday October 10, 2008, approximately one month after I got in and after I had lost about a third of what I had invested initially just a few short weeks ago, I am no longer talking about how smart I am. I am just praying that my initial investment isn't depleted when the market rebounds, which is shaping up to be right around the time the Anti-Christ comes to power. I am hoping that Toyota keeps making hybrids, solar energy and US Gold hit their stride and I make it start rolling in the dough. Yeah, and I am also waiting for monkeys to fly out of my ass.

My father has always been mentioned as someone who has had incredible luck. Buying land at the exact right time, getting the right deal on the right car at the right time, beating cancer not once, but twice to continue on in this crazy world, just to name a few. "Lucky Murray", they call him. If you know him, you have a "Lucky Murray" story or two, I'm sure. I thought I had a portion of that same luck in me these past few years. You know, meeting my wife, being around for my step-mom and father when he first got sick, falling into a good kb with great people (I almost went to work with Ameriprise...shudder!), writing that horrible manuscript I had always dreamed of writing back in November 2006, which just so happened to be National Novel Writing Month, unbeknown st to me. I have been trying to fit this market craziness into the "Lucky Murray" file and had trouble at first. How can losing more than a third of my investment--no matter how small--be considered lucky? How can my feeling that I should get into the market when I did be described as a nothing more than a terrible choice and extremely bad timing? "Lucky" is my dad. Me, not so much, right?

The glass is perpetually half full in my world, and as long as I can fight the urge to drink it, my mind never deviates from that outlook. I always try and find the silver lining, roll with the punches and stay positive. (Of course, being properly medicated always helps.) The following is ultimately what I have learned, what I will take away from the past four weeks of market mayhem (with the recognition that this whole thing ain't over yet):

1. I will never have learned as much about investing as I have in the past few weeks, while the experts run around frantically to try and right the ship and my egg gets splattered all over the US, Europe and Asia.

2. That a savings account, although small potatoes, is basically no risk and all reward.

3. That if the market rebounds before my investment reaches $0.00, I am in a great position to reap the benefits of a bear market.

4. At least I did not put everything I had into an investment system that is never a guarantee, a system that has seen unprecedented growth over the past 15 years, a system that was due for a major league correction,

5. That I, very probably, could have been left standing with nothing what so ever if had bet it all on green.