Invest in What You Know

It was gratifying to watch the film “The Big Short” take home a gold statue on Oscar night a few weeks ago. That excellent film was one of the biggest surprises to come out of Hollywood recently.

We owe the producers and the star-studded cast a debt of gratitude for making a film that explains the housing bust in such an accessible way. The housing collapse, as the film notes, upended so many lives but has not been very well understood by those it affected the most.

In the film we see a scathing rebuke of Wall Street, not only for unbridled avarice, but reckless ignorance/nefariousness in managing the precious resources of investors and sensitive assets of consumers – their homes.

It has been deeply troubling and frustrating for many since 2008 to look at the mismanagement, yet feel their retirement funds are still held hostage by Wall Street. How can this whole class of Wall Street elite bankers screw over an entire sector, only to be bailed out by the same taxpayers and homeowners they ruined?

It is not fair, but this is how Wall Street still works.

And today we see the big banks making strikingly similar mistakes with oil … and they are still managing people’s retirement funds. It’s maddening. But this is what happens when no one is held personally accountable for their contributions to the great American tragedy of our day.

No one went to jail. Almost none of them lost their jobs after the reshuffling. Almost no one was called out for fraud. No, the bailouts kept the biggest instigators working and insulated from their failures, passing the burden along to everyone else.

More and more Americans are fed up with this dynamic enough to actively seek out alternatives to Wall Street and all its corruption and inscrutability for the safeguarding of their retirement funds.

Retail investors are falling back on the very best old advice — to invest in what you know. Invest in what you can feel, what you can understand, and in things that are solid and real — the opposite of swaps and derivatives and options and all that mumbo jumbo.

Read the rest of this article and learn about a self-directed IRA at LearCapital.com.

Scott Carter is chief executive officer of Lear Capital. He is an economic theorist, an investment specialist, and an authority on precious metals. Carter is also a popular talk-show guest with appearances on Bloomberg Businessweek, CBS Market Watch, Fox Business News, The National Post, Forbes, and Investors.com. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.