From counting cars in the parking lot at Wal-Mart (WMT) to poring over Blue-Square Israel’s (BSI) annual report, there are innumerable ways to invest. Everybody with money, regardless if it’s $100 or $100 million, must find a style or series of styles that work for them.
As a kid, I was too chicken to get a tattoo because I knew that one day I’d grow up and most likely no longer like it. Tattoos, I knew, look great on college kids. White, old flabby bodies aren’t as appealing a canvas.
Successful investments—and a successful life—require that type of rational, long-term thinking. Man is not ruled by instinct or impulse. To make money, we must carefully consider the future, our situation and how to take prudent risk in an uncertain world.
As our government embarks on a historic press to further tax, regulate and control the free economy, one hopes they have some of the same long-range perspective as to how their actions could affect much more than just next month’s employment numbers.
Could regulators ever have foreseen 24-hour E-Mini futures or volatility ETNs when they passed the Securities Act of 1933? Did our elected officials truly imagine a multitrillion-dollar unfunded liability for Social Security, also part of the New Deal, before it was passed? Even something as simple as extending FDIC guarantees on bank deposits affects trillions of dollars in ways not even Chairwoman Sheila Bair can possible anticipate.
So many of today’s financial quagmires stem not from free markets, but from government intervention. Health care and finance, most notably, haven’t been totally unfettered in generations.
And while I have tremendous faith in the productivity of rational businesspeople looking to maximize profit over the long term, I’m less confident in the choices made by opportunistic politicians looking toward the midterm elections. Their decisions will haunt us for generations to come.
Warren Buffett’s annual fundraiser for the Guide Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit, ended with a winning bid of $1,680,300 from a still-unknown bidder. While down from last year’s $2,110,100 record bid, the donation still reflects the second largest haul over the lunch’s 10-year history.

Source: Bloomberg
“The chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.”
—President Calvin Coolidge, 1925
Jonathan Hoenig is managing member at Capitalistpig Hedge Fund LLC.