Aftershock: Protect Yourself and Profit In The Next Global Financial Meltdown, Second Edition

Plenty of Profit Opportunities, but They Will Feel Quite Uncomfortable, Even Scary at Times

Gone are the days when you could just sit back with a glass of wine or a six-pack of beer and watch TV, knowing that by the end of the year your house would be worth 10 to 20 percent more than at the start of the year even though you didn’t lift a finger to improve it.

Gone are the days when you could just buy a set of stocks or mutual funds that everyone else buys and watch them rise 1,400 percent in 25 years, or if you chose higher-growth stocks, watch them grow 2,500 percent or more. No need to be a stock-picking genius or a high-risk, high-judgment venture capitalist to make ridiculously high returns. In fact, for most investors, it was better if you didn’t use any judgment at all and just chose index funds, as John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Funds (the second largest mutual fund company in the United States), correctly advised. Back then, you could just sit back and watch the stock market automatically take your investments to tremendous heights while you did absolutely nothing.

Those were the good old days. That’s over now. Today, good judgment and taking risks are critical to making money and will be even more so in the future. In fact, good judgment and taking risks will be critical to simply holding onto your money in the future. Without smart thinking and some risk-taking, your money will go straight to Money Heaven, along with just about everyone else’s money in the coming ...