Last night, I was watching one of my favorite shows, "Ancient Mysteries." If you've followed my Fribbles, you might see that I am a serious history buff. Anyway, Ancient Mysteries is usually very good. This one was an exception. It explored the "mystery" as to whether UFOs visited Earth in ancient times. Obscure Bible passages were quoted, some ancient pictures shown, and other writings were examined as well. Believe it or not, this does relate to investing, but I'll go about it in my usual round about way.
I suppose if you squint hard, and have been drinking heavily, you might see what looks like an alien in some ancient cave paintings. Of course, the one they showed on TV looked like a stick figure my son Jay drew when he was three (could he have been seeing aliens?), but what do I know? Of the Bible passages were quoted, one supposedly key piece of "evidence" was from Genesis, where angels are said to have had sex with human women and given birth to giants (yes, there is a passage that refers to that). The "angels" of course were aliens. Fee Fi Fo Fum!
It is possible to visit more primitive societies. With the U.S. military, I went to a remote region in Honduras where life hasn't changed much in a couple hundred years. You can tell where we were; we left Coke bottles, plastic wrappers, beer cans, etc. Many of these things will be there 10,000 years from now. The pocket calculator I lost in La Jagua may be found 30,000 years from now. The battery will be dead, but it might still work. Why haven't these aliens left behind so much as an intergalactic plastic flashlight? Not only are they technologically advanced, they are neat too!
How about those angels? I'm not a doctor, and MF Cormend may need to correct me on this, but I would assume we would have a better chance of interbreeding with salamanders than somebody from a jillion light years from here. There is a serious problem with breeding between two species; the genes, DNA and that stuff has to be pretty close. Not only that, how sexually attractive would beings from outer space find us? We might be as alluring as pigs, and the only thought they would have might be ham and cheese sandwiches when they saw us.
When you consider the absurdity of the argument that people would travel over all this distance to get here, stay only long enough to part the Red Sea, and clean up all their mess and go, it makes it next to impossible to believe such nonsense. Still people believe. Why? Because they want to. Maybe some alien will come and do a miracle for us, and share with us their amazing technology. Maybe they will come back and take away the nuclear weapons and stop hunger. They may even come back and zap those Pringle commercials off TV. Miracles are nice aren't they?
As preposterous as believing in aliens is, how about some more down to Earth beliefs we have? Here's an obvious one, investing in penny stocks. There was that company with the 6 million baud modem that never appeared. People get into strategies that are difficult to understand, thinking they can make money when most people lose. Strategies like futures trading, derivatives, options, and short-term trading. All of these are strategies proven to lose you money. Still, people try.
Sure, futures are good for certain people, like my cousin Clarence the Farmer. He could always sell part of his crop on the futures market, increase his cash flow, and lessen his risk. For most of us, it is just gambling against things we have no control over. Derivatives and options probably have some use, but often putting money in them is just a gambling strategy. I've read all the claims people have about their great gains in short-term trading and how good they are. I've also read that Elvis lives and that an alien endorsed Clinton (see Weekly World News for more info).
I can't bring myself to believe aliens visited Earth, but other people will continue to cling to this belief stubbornly. I expect some flaming e-mail on this too (probably full of misspellings). The same can be true of many methods of investing. Are they really good strategies, or are they something to believe in because they would be good if true? I'll stick to my Foolish beliefs and invest in what I know, evaluate the companies, and go by approaches that have been time tested. Let the others believe in the 6 million baud modems. That's not so alien, is it?