From time to time people say to me, “Spazmo, what do you know about making investments?” They might mention online trading, five-baggers and “sure things.” I assume that they’ve made an unconscious drift into sexual innuendos, so I stop them from speaking with a quick dog bark followed by my honest answer—don’t invest your money in stocks and please forget that vocabulary you were just using. Responses vary: “Do you expect me to retire to a diet of Ramen noodles,” or “But my children hate me and I’ll need to take care of myself,” and almost always “Did you just bark at me?”

But let me clarify a couple of things:

1. I did bark at you

2. Putting money in an IRA, mutual fund, or money market is a great way to save for your retirement. However, thinking you can play the market yourself is a sign of a big head and some serious wrong-thinking. I mean come on, look at you. Sitting there in your underwear, absent-mindedly fingering a mole on God knows what part of your body… you think you can beat professional investors that handle IRAs? Guys who, on a daily basis, ingest cocaine in chemical permutations that won’t hit the sreet for six years, guys who have a psychotic lack of distraction from a reptillian goal that can be only articulated as the word “more”? You’re …

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