That wasn’t my rejoinder, however. It’s this: there’s an exception to your good rule of thumb on the inefficacy of the “buy & hold” strategy.

Currently, there are certain stock sectors in which the opposite is overwhelmingly true. I’m talking about the gold and silver commodities. I can’t recall if I talked to you about that a while ago, vis-a-vis my brother’s investments. I might have. At any rate, that was a few years ago, when gold was around $275 and silver $5. Last week, gold hit $600, and silver has been trading at 25-year highs, around $12.

Can you imagine the performance of publicly traded gold and silver mining companies at the moment? ::chuckle:: Can you imagine if you made an investment just 3 years ago, as I had suggested? ::double-chuckle:: That investment would have been presumed to be buy & hold, too. And actually, it still is. The analysts my bro watches say that gold could reach the low 4 figures in a year or two, and silver around $65.

He has been making an absolute killing, using b&h on those commodities, and on stocks of gold and silver mining concerns.

So yes, there definitely are exceptions. And if you’d like to make an exciting investment, now’s the time to get in on that action, even with commodity prices relatively high, compared to a scant few years ago. Why now? They’re still rising. In a year or so, there will be an absolute stampede, mark my words. But by then prices (on commodities and stocks) will be so astronomical as to make the whole deal absurd. Guess what my bro will be doing then. ::chuckle::

Personally, I don’t worry about it that much. I’ve already gone through a couple of phases where I got tired of watching the market following a sell—and this is when handling only one stock. I don’t see that changing for me.

Really, as much as I talk about money, I think of money only as an empowerer. Money allows you to do things—explore personal interests, not have to worry about family expenses, buy Odama =), etc. If accumulating money pushes out everything else in your life, what’s the point?

The REAL caveat is this — one risks becoming an obsessive ticker-checker. You can’t check just once a day or a few times or several times a day… you’ll find yourself checking, at first, ever few hours or so. Which will quickly become every hour or so. Then multiple times an hour. And before you know it, you’re on permanent check. ::chuckle::

I’ve known day traders whose real day jobs simply fell by the wayside, because of this eventuality. If you day-trade a handful of stocks, that’s what’ll happen, guaranteed. If you have one or two, you can get away with not having to monitor the ticker constantly. But more than that? Well, you can imagine.

I have another rejoinder in the pipeline, but I’ll wait for what you have to say next. ;-)