Happy Easter

Happy Easter! Zach won't be getting any candy this year, but he did get this very cool Elmo couch. He also received a new Ohio State jersey from his Aunt Sally - a very important gift since football season is quickly approaching.

RIP Bear Stearns

Yep...it finally happened today. A major player on Wall Street went under. Bear Stearns, one of the most well-respected names on the Street sold out to JP Morgan for $2 per share. It was at $160 per share less than a year ago and $100 per share in December. I almost fell out of my chair this morning when I found out.

Now...no matter how you feel about the company(or whether you have ever even heard of them), there is one sad thing about the demise...7,000 people are going to lose their jobs. I think JP Morgan was planning on keeping half of the estimated 14,000 employees of Bear, but the other half is going to be shortly out of a job. I feel for these people. In addition, there are some stories I heard today about Bear employees who had their entire retirement plan tied up in Bear Stearns stock. While I feel bad for someone who is ready to retire and only has $50,000 to their name, I feel even worse if that account was worth $1 Million a few weeks ago. This brings me to today's lesson, fellow readers....DIVERSIFY!!!!

Most of these people at Bear are very smart people so they should have diversified their retirement accounts. But I know there are lots that didn't. Take my advice....don't be stupid...DO NOT HAVE ALL OF YOUR MONEY INVESTED IN ONE STOCK!!!!. I can preach this over and over to people but there is always someone who thinks they are smarter than everyone else. Ask the people at Bear Stearns...Ask the people at Enron. Don't have more than 10% of your portfolio in one stock and you will live to fight another day if the company blows up. You won't be happy when you lose 10% of your money, but it sure beats losing your entire life savings. It's just not worth it....

More Pix of Zach

At the request of Aunt Sally, here are a couple more pictures of Zach from the past week. This picture shows Zach in normal 7am spot....rummaging through the cabinets. Please note that he is getting ready to throw around some very loud kitchen utensils.



Zach wearing his new shades on the fire truck. This was taken about half a second before he threw them off . He doesn't really like the shades, but we keep putting them on hoping he will change his mind. No luck so far....

Client #9

Caption: "This is about how much of my penis is going to be left after my wife chops it off tonight".

So there I was, having a rather terrible day at work. The market is getting hammered AGAIN, oil prices are at completely irrational numbers, and it is cloudy outside. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, along comes the Eliot Spitzer story and all is good with the world again.

As anyone who works on Wall Street can tell you, this guy is a scumbag. He has always hid behind the "crusader" label and did it all for political gain. I have been trying to find my post from a year or two ago where I ripped into him about this, but just can't seem to find it. No matter...old "Client #9" showed his true colors today.

Finally...after all of the scandals involving Republicans like Larry Craig and Mark Foley, I get to see a Democrat fry a little bit! I did find it rather funny that the NBC Nightly News only spent 4 minutes on the story tonight...the same amount of time they spent on the Obama/Clinton race. I seem to remember at least half of the newscast devoted to Larry Craig when he got busted trying to get some action in the airport bathroom stall last year. I even saw old James Carville on CNN tonight defending Spitzer and saying how this wasn't a big deal. Keep diggin that hole, Jimmy...I will even hand you the shovel....