The Securities and Exchange Commission, who I
thought were to police investments and to catch wrongdoers like,
supposedly, Madoff did with the estimated 50 billion dollar fund that he ran.
The North American Securities Administrators Association, who you probably
haven't heard of before, is supposed to Protect and Serve you and me, the
investing community.
It's the right thing to prosecute the
wrongdoers, but it would even be a better thing to catch this stuff before
shareholders lose everything, well not everything, some get a court settlement
of pennies on the dollar. We all know that investing has risk, but I don't
think dishonest deceiving money mongers is part of the risk we should be taking.
I don't know what the answer is, but
someone needs to come up with something that can begin the mending process for
individual investors. Let's face it, this time is different, investors have
no clue where to put their money in the stock market. If you can't trust
individual company's stock, funds, money managers, banks, and the organizations
that are supposed to keep you safe from the bad guys, what is an investor to do.
Maybe Generation X or Y will have trust in stocks
in 10
or 20 years from now, but for the Baby-boomers this may have been the last straw.
Time will tell, I hope I'm wrong, but even more so, I hope that something gets
put in place so it doesn't happen again.
February, 2009
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Reader Comment:
They are probably cheap if you have 20-30
years. Past 10 years stocks haven't really done much at all unless you are
a trader. Retail investor probably will never get back in, well, maybe a
little here and there, but lots of folks are cashing out, paying debt down, at
least you can make progress on the budget. It seem every time you get into
the stock market it goes down and if you get stung enough you just avoid it.
Besides PE's are one thing but how do you deal with all the surprise news and
disaster. The stock market just isn't reliable enough anymore. And
if you are brave enough to get in, how do you avoid the Enron's and WorldCom's
of the world, or, be unlucky and invest with Madoff types. Look at Cisco
Systems. You would think that is a stable company but it seem to be
treading water. I think the days of retail investors piling in are gone,
at least for a good while. xstoc |
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