I Apologize, Nancy... But I Still Don't Like You.

[Warph]

Well.... I screwed up on the Nancy Pelosi post and thanks to Frank he put me straight.  You are sooo right, Frank.  The Story is bogus.  I usually check these things out with Snopes but I didn't with this one.  Maybe because it was an email from my financial advisor's secretary.  Man, who can you trust anymore.  And you are so right about the companies that make up the stock market.  Do you play the stock market, Frank?  The stock market's so volatile these days.... so dependent on so many minute indicators.  What was it, Monday I think, the Dow Jones industrial average took another nose dive, before rallying today. You know, lately, the stock market's been performing like a blind dominatrix...you never know when she's going to hit bottom.

It's like playing the lottery, Frank.  For instance, a $50 billion manufacturer of 16 different microprocessing components, each indispensable to the computer industry, can see its stock price plummet by half or more, solely on the rumor that Benny Jackman on the loading dock says it hurts when he pees.  And now, with the advent of the Internet, an unholy alliance between the homecomputer and the stock market has spawned the day-trader, the kind of proto-loser who is spotwelded into his Incredible Hulk underoos down in the basement, his trembling, silver-Lotto-scratch-card dust-encrusted fingernails frantically pounding "buy" and "sell" orders into his keyboard so loudly that he can't even hear his mother upstairs crying out for the good old days when all he did online was compulsively masturbate.

I don't want to act like I'm a fiscal expert here. As a matter of fact, when it comes to my own investments, I have only one question: What do all those numbers mean?  Seriously, what would I know about what things are actually worth?  Hell, I'm a retired senior citizen, for chrissakes. When the market began to tank last month, I couldn't get my broker on the phone. Finally, his secretary admitted he had quit to take a job with Exxon, but she couldn't quite remember which gas station it was.

I've learned some painful lessons about investing, Frank. There's no substitute for doing your homework before investing in a company?  Good, solid, sound fiscal research. When I'm thinking of investing in a retail chain, for example, what I do is go to one of their stores, and lock myself in a bathroom stall. Then I curl up in a fetal ball on the floor and emit a low, painful- sounding groan, and I time how long it takes one of the assistant managers to come in and see if I'm okay.  Wal-Mart?  3 minutes. Target?
Half hour.  K-Mart?  Kibbel, the night janitor, woke me up at three in the morning and asked me if I had any rolling papers. Crazy, huh?  I know investing is a risky proposition, and I don't mind losing my shirt, but can I have my pants back?  Last year I bought Pets-dot-com at thirty.  Two weeks later, it was dropping faster than Al Roker on a greasy flagpole.  You'd think I would have learned my lesson, but instead I moved my remaining capital into something called e-Toys.  And last time I looked, that stock had broken through zero and was tunneling into the molten magma at the core of our planet. 
I don't know, Frank.... I'm thinking about giving it up, the Market I mean.  What do you think?