These are the Times that Try Men's Souls

It’s impossible to ignore the recent rancor here. Personal insults of Saul, now deleted, are a first and obviously not what we come here for. Times have got to be hard for Saul too and if this keeps up – well, you can imagine the consequences. If he were like many us, he’d just say the hell with this. But he keeps on providing a wonderful forum and sage advice.
I’ve had my issues with Saul. There are times as Monkey says, he has singed my hair and made me feel about an eighth of an inch high. At those time I always tell myself he’s created a wonderful place of enlightenment and let me in for the price of only a few barbs. I’d call that quite a bargain.

I want to share with all of you something I read in the Wall Street Journal:
“In the fall of 1939, just after Adolf Hitler’s forces blasted into Poland and plunged the world into war, a young man from a small town in Tennessee instructed his broker to buy $100 worth of every stock trading on a major U.S. exchange for less than $1 per share.
His broker reported back that he’d bought a sliver of every company trading under $1 that wasn’t bankrupt. “No, no,” exclaimed the client, “I want them all. Every last one, bankrupt or not.” He ended up with 104 companies, 34 of them in bankruptcy.
The customer was named John Templeton. At the tender age of 26, he had to borrow $10,000—more than $200,000 today—to finance his courage.
Mr. Templeton died in 2008, but in December 1989, I interviewed him at his home in the Caribbean. I asked how he had felt when he bought those stocks in 1939.
“I regarded my own fear as a signal of how dire things were,” said Mr. Templeton, a deeply religious man. “I wasn’t sure they wouldn’t get worse, and in fact they did. But I was quite sure we were close to the point of maximum pessimism.”

Although things, yet, are nowhere near as dire as 1939, we are facing calamities not seen in many years; e.g. a very serious threat of war, inflation, fracturing of global trading, etc… Who knows if we’re near the end of these serious troubles ; or if will things get worse as they did during the 1940’s.

All I know is that we’re invested in good companies and if we stick with them we’ll see the light of day again. It may in a month, or a year or several years. But we will succeed.

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We should probably not continue this post with follow ups because it does not provide any suggestions of good stock choices nor insightful analysis.

But I will just add EVERYONE should read the Wall Street Journal. It’s titled “The Secret to Braving a Wild Market” and contains so many more jewels of wisdom, which I don’t think I’m at liberty to quote. It can be found at https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secret-to-braving-a-wild-ma…

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