A Taste of Money

I wish I knew more about international economies in terms that would actually help me invest my money in a clever fashion, but I can still promise you the fantasies I have about it all are very amusing to me in a story-line kind of way. They involve some hot-ass trader who's golden on the inside, like Sébastien from Les invasions barbares, actually taking some interest in my piddly little nest egg and turning it into great baths of cash by taking merciless advantage of market fluctuations, whether brought on by cataclysmic events or no. The sort of hot-ass trader who'll invest in Thailand right after a royally-approved coup, for example, or who'll've been geopolitically realistic enough to get heavily into oil futures in the summer of 2001. At a given point, after treating me to multiple digit returns through my fertile years, he takes me away from all this, which usually involves moving to Italy and raising goats somewhere close to a good opera house where our children perform and get us free tickets.

If analysis has taught me anything, it's taught me other things, but now I understand that generally my fantasies are ways of understanding bits of myself, and that the hot-ass Sébastien character in my head is the way I understand the bit that cares about investing and accumulating money. I can tell this because since the death of my Grandpa, who made his money more with investments than with his job, Sébastien has been looking less and less like a scathingly hot buttoned-down Stéphane Rousseau and more and more like a post-war banker from Leicestershire who has a nose and chin like mine. He's also been getting quite a bit more strident, and you wouldn't believe how the big worldwide stock slump that started yesterday is making him whinge.

Not because we stand to lose money - I don't think we do at all - but because there has to be a way to take advantage of this, investorally speaking, and the Sébastien/Grandpa bit of me doesn't fucking know what it is, and doesn't know what it is just at the moment that it has become urgent to consolidate my tax-free investment portfolio with a new investor's group, since I'm leaving my job. I have a notion that now, or a week from now, or whenever the slump bottoms out, is a really great time to buy things. But what the hell does that mean, anyways? Buy what? Buy into funds? What funds? Would most mutual funds be diversified enough at the moment that they wouldn't be slumping? Would they be over-priced at this point because people are selling off their individual stocks and jumping into those? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. The real Sébastien and the real Grandpa would. So fucking frustrating.