My Kind of Survey

Told you so.  Told you University of Texas should be ranked higher and it is---NUMBER ONE party school. 

What is interesting is the Bottom Ten party schools.  And they are:

1. Brigham Young

2. Wheaton College

3. College of the Ozarks

4. Grove City College

5. Naval Academy

6. Coast Guard Academy

7. Air Force Academy

8. Queens College

9. Wellesley College

10. Calvin College

Not sure about Brigham Young.  My only experience with the school was following Jim McMahon, the one eyed ex-Chicago Bears quarterback who took them to their lone Super Bowl in 1985.  Jim showed up at training camp in a limo, in a tuxedo, drinking a beer.  That guy had to know where the parties were.

Wellesley at number 9?  Didn't Hillary go there?  My sister was going to but our dad put the stopper to that one--too much money.  Probably saved my sister from four dreadful years.   

Ok, enough about school.  Back to finance and making money. 

Take a look at this http://finance.yahoo.com/columnist/article/yourlife/8168.  The title is "Do I Hear Cannons?"  The theory is not to buy stocks when everybody else is but buy them when no one is buying them.  In my category on investments, my quote is similar--Buy when there is blood in the streets.  Which was actually said by a Rothschild but let's not quibble.

This article is by Ben Stein--late of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and the great TV show "Win Ben Stein's Money." 

Read the article but the theory is summed up here.

Buy at the Bottom

"But," I thought as I sat in my little seat, my head reeling, "this makes no sense at all."

In fact, their advice was precisely opposite to the truth: The exact time to buy is when stocks are low -- when there's fear in the market and sellers are flocking to sell.

That's when you get the same stock -- or the same basket of stocks if, like me, you buy and/or hold ETFs or mutual funds and variable annuities -- with the same long-term prospects at a bargain price. When everyone else hates the XYZ Widget Company because of rockets flying over Israel and Lebanon, it's still the same company, but you get it at a discount.

Eventually, the fear will go out of the market. Economic conditions will right themselves. There will be a ceasefire in the Middle East (alas, probably only a temporary one) and stocks will rally. It may take awhile, but it always happens. And then the buying opportunity is nowhere near as good.

Another way of summing it up is the concept of sales.  When there is a sale at Best Buy or Macys, people flock there.  They don't flock to the stock market when the bottom falls out.  They should but they don't.  Well, not all don't.  The smart ones jump in and buy. 

In the 2001 collapse, a collapse that scared the heck out of me, I was talking to a financial planner who had just got off the phone with a client who ordered him to sell his stocks--all of them.  Why did the client want to sell?  Because the stocks were going to zero.  Yes, zero.  The planner moaned that the client was basically saying the US economy, all of it, was worth less than the stapler on his desk.

Of course, the client was wrong and lost his shirt.  Bet that made for some interesting conversation around the dinner table. 

You don't have to worry about this if you are investing on a regular basis.  But read the article anyway to make yourself feel better.

In the next couple of days we will look at a few more "bad things" that may actually be good for you, you and your wallet.