Because if it is, we have a guy you should meet.

A press release from the SEC occasioned a trip on the Wayback Machine yesterday, to see if anything turned up on one Arnett L. Waters, president and CEO of A.L. Waters Capital, a Braintree, Mass. firm that allegedly solicited investments in an array of funds, then used the assets to pay for the manager's personal expenses.

Indeed, we found an interesting nugget. After sketching out his career in sales at a string of brokerages, including Merrill Lynch, Shearson Lehman and DLJ—details that appear to be borne out by a FINRA broker check—Mr. Waters' claims to have made the observation that launched his career running money:

"The dramatic increase in rare coins in the 1970s and 1980s convinced Mr. Waters that a value-investing approach existed in the growing marketplace. Therefore, in 1990, he founded Windsor Park Ltd., an international purveyor of high mint state United States gold and silver coins."

Maybe there's something we're missing, but we always thought of value investing as the search for assets whose underlying value exceeds the market price, like if gold coins were selling for less than their weight in gold. Which might be just the insight that landed on Mr. Waters from on high, but if so, sounds like the kind of too-good-to-be-true investment opportunity best left in your junk mailbox.

Well, you can laugh, and perhaps you will, but there were victims here, including a Boston-area church that appears to have given Waters a serious chunk of change.

Some highlights from the SEC complaint:

• A.L. Waters Capital and CEO Mr. Waters marketed fictitious funds that purported to invest in securities related to gold, oil, uranium and rare earth metals;
• Told investors, falsely, that the firm's Port Huron Partners Fund had $180 million in assets under management;
• Later deposited a check from a Boston-area church for $500,000 into a Port Huron Partners bank account that had previously contained $205.79;
• And used investor funds to pay for personal expenses such as property taxes, utility bills and a horse farm.

A quick review of Waters' FINRA records, meanwhile, indicate that he had his Series 7 license suspended for two years after it was alleged that Waters forged a bank officer's signature on a personal loan he took from the bank.

Mr. Waters didn't respond to an e-mail seeking comment, but an investor named Arnett Waters is still tweeting from the below profile:

Jamie Oliver

England's Sun reports that chef Jamie Oliver's new Manchester restaurant got an unlikely infusion of capital when construction uncovered gold and "master tapes by bands Joy Division and New Order." The site was apparently formerly occupied by a bank--though now it is the Mancunian outpost of Jamie's Italian. "There was all sorts in the boxes — even a gun in one," said one breathless bystander, though we're still more impressed by the New Order tapes.

MIDAS TOUCH?

Let's start with a Tweet from CanadianMarketWatch and this morning's Bloomberg filing, titled Gold Tumbles Most Since December 2008:

Gold plunged in New York, heading for the biggest drop in 18 months, on speculation that financial markets may be stabilizing, eroding the appeal of the precious metal a haven. [...] “This is just pure panic selling,” Frank McGhee, the head dealer at Integrated Brokerage Services in Chicago, said in a telephone interview. Before today, gold’s 14-day relative strength had been above 70 since Aug. 8, a signal to technical traders that prices are poised to fall.

And that was before it started dipping again:

Twitter, if you know where to look, resembles something like a ringside aisle near a contender being speechlessly and mercilessly beaten to a pulp. There's far more bloodthirst to be found than a simple LOL. A moderate sampling:

Gold—especially by consumer/retail investing standards—has become bit of a pedestrian play over the last four years due in no small part to the proliferation of secondary and tertiary "markets" (CASH 4 GOLD, for example) and widespread stories of hedge fund managers getting rich off the stuff in big plays (David Einhorn, John Paulson). Because of this, talk about gold generally seems to be split into three parties:

• There's everyone who went in early, got paid, and will use any occasion to tell everyone else they were right.
• There's everyone who wants to get paid, recently bought in, and will use anything as a great reason to tell everyone else to buy.
• And then there's everyone else, who think gold investors are slightly unhinged, if not total idiots.

Of course, that arrogant first group is always an easy conductor of virtrol: the risk of unchecked ego being checked usually rises with its outgrowth.

As for the second group, it's made up of people so painfully lusty for what those who bought gold earlier earned that:

(A) They'll find any excuse to tell others why they're wrong by not taking a position favoring gold, which

(B) Has elicited the Twitter joke-as-hashtag "#BuyGold," wherein anything from a dog winning the Westminster show to the weather changing directions becomes a reason to buy gold.

Given the circumstances, gold's naysayers have plenty of ammunition: anybody with unilateral views hostile to having those views questioned is likely the exact kind of person who should have their views questioned. But gold bugs might be slightly easier to ignore if it hadn't taken on such a retail quality appealing to (or exploiting) willing Johnny-come-latelies, or the kind of press that screams at everyone from the sole vantage point of "you could've bought the Mets with gold money, too."

As such, it might be easy to see why gold falling would correlate with an inordinate amount of schaudenfreude—or goldenfreude—rising. A mathematical example? Even Nouriel Roubini—who used only one Tweet yesterday to extol the virtues of his own consistent (and consistently loud) opinion on Dominique Strauss-Kahn—has used not one, not two,  not three, but at least seven Tweets as of this writing expressing some form of glee at a three-day fall in gold, with no indication of slowing down at the moment. Granted, this is his shtick (see: being correct about something, and then screaming about it until he becomes The Mascot For Being Correct About Something), but in this glee he's far from alone.

Ben Davies of London-based Hinde Capital (which manages the bullion-buying Hinde Gold Fund) would agree: "Usually all the gold bears come out the woodwork crowing – on any correction," he noted over email, citing—of course—Nouriel Roubini. And this, today? "This is a much needed and healthy correction. Physical demand we are experiencing is high and this pull back will only fuel the surge above $2,000 over the Asian buying season."

It was slightly more humbled than an emailed discussion with Mr. Davies for a previous piece:

Gold, as our very own Chris Powell (GATA) never tires of telling me, is the centre of the universe, and truth be told I never tire of him saying it. The symbol for gold – is an eye in a circle – from the Egyptian for the Sun God - Ra. It means all seeing. The steady rise in the price of gold is that of knowledge. Gold is all knowing. Like our own visual cortex is gold predicting an outcome?

Maybe, when gold picks itself up from today's loss, gold bugs may bug anybody within earshot a little less, and truncate their gospel. Maybe then, in turn, the bloodsport of Goldenfreude would tone itself down as well.

Then again, if the comments on a recent Business Insider post—ever a decent temperature-taker of certain investors' sociopathic id—are any indication, the amusingly vicious cycle of gold bugs' buzzzing and being stepped on is going nowhere anytime soon.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Sculpture by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Photo via PIERRE VERDY/AFP/Getty Images

Back in early June I wrote a piece for the Art Newspaper in which I predicted that bad news would drive the price of gold, then at $1,500 an ounce, substantially higher.

Well, the bad news came, with the Standard & Poor’s rating agency’s downgrading our U.S. government debt, precipitating massive fear of a double-dip recession, which in turn has led to the overall perception that the current Obama administration is bungling things. This has driven the stock market into a highly unusual summer spasm, as it reels down 500 points in a day only to bounce up and sink again—the dreaded “dead cat” bounce. The government claims interest rates will stay at close to zero for the foreseeable future—not good news for you cash mavens—so gold skipped to a new record high of $1,740 an ounce.

Given how right I was, did I buy any? No, because I’m against gold, and everything gold stands for. Instead, I continue to buy art, and I won’t be convinced otherwise.

I’ve never been a “gold bug.” In fact, I hate bugs of all types, and so I’d never buy into gold like investment gurus John Paulson and Tom Kaplan did. They were smart: it’s rallied 440% in only six years, which of course makes me dislike it even more. I’ve never bought an ounce of the stuff in my life and I hope I never do. The price of gold is a barometer for our collective anxiety and irrational neuroses. I’m referring to global financial meltdown, famine, nuclear meltdown, tsunami, anarchy in the Middle East and eventually hyperinflation.

But I was already scared, and buying gold will only confirm my innermost “end of the world” fears, which is the very thing I’m trying to suppress. So it makes sense that I don’t like the cold profiteers who buy gold; they’re calculating opportunists who profit from any bad news that hits my TV screen, and there’s been no shortage of it.

What of art you say? Hasn’t it appreciated too? Well, it’s been solid, and no one is letting great works sell at a discount. But art is an investment in culture, whereas gold is an investment in fear.

Now, I’m sure some of those gold bugs have art too, probably the kind of blue-chip treasures that were well researched, well bought and now well hung. The thought of it makes me jealous. They have a nice Picasso, a Twombly, a Matisse and a Fontana, but I can’t imagine their ever taking emotional leaps and making risky bets on emerging or oversize works: gold investors always play it smart and safe.

Collecting contemporary art requires both knowledge and some feel. No matter how many dealers and consultants show you the way, to be good at it requires faith in your own eyes, something gold bugs will never have. They don’t need an eye. When they want to value their cache, all they have to do is weigh it. It trades every minute of every day so there’s no need to bother with an appraisal or an auction estimate. Gold is shiny, mindless and cold, and because every ounce is minted to an identical weight and shape, it has a perfection that art can never equal.

Art has no tangible value. Its only value is cultural, and so it fluctuates wildly with fashion and the art historical mood of the moment. But is gold’s value any more real? As far as I can tell the metal is totally useless, and only a small portion of the world’s production serves a purpose: in the form of jewelry. Though in the past gold was the back-up for paper money currencies, it hasn’t been for decades.

To make matters worse, consider two disturbing facts: as the price per ounce rises the mines start digging up more and more of the stuff, creating horrible pollution (huge quantities of cyanide are used to leach gold ore). Then, most of the gold that has ever been produced is still extant—meaning there are endless amounts of the stuff stored in savings banks everywhere.

Good art, on the other hand, can be hard to find and sometimes hard to get. The bonus is that, when trying to acquire it, you meet lots of interesting people: curators, dealers, collectors, socialites and even a movie star or two. Art also has a real purpose. Though some would claim it is mainly decorative, in fact it is of broad cultural value. It has purpose in the same way that Beethoven’s music, Balanchine’s choreography or Bergman’s films have purpose: they satisfy the mind and the soul, and isn’t that what we’re here for?

Despite their apparent differences, art and gold do share a common thread: they are both pure luxury. Artists throughout history have picked up on this and that’s why Andy Warhol did gold “Jackies,” Damien Hirst did gold pill cabinets and Takashi Murakami made a huge gold Buddha for Versailles. In fact, Marcel Broodthaers once minted gold bars to finance an imaginary museum, and Yves Klein sold checks for an imaginary “zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility” that could be bought only for pieces of gold, half of which he threw into the Seine! (I suppose he pocketed the rest … )

Despite all the talk of art as investment, and the fact that a lot of art has appreciated, I think you would still be much better off with gold. Contrary to popular thinking, selling your art for its theoretical “value” is not as easy as it seems. Quite often nobody wants what you have, or nobody wants to pay you what you think it’s worth. Dealers work hard in trying to sell what’s hanging in their galleries, and auction houses fail to sell a substantial percentage of their lots despite the fact that they select their pieces carefully and invest money and manpower in their catalogs, previews and auctions.

Gold bugs don’t suffer these uncertainties—every ounce is 100% predictable, they go up and down in unison, and you can sell out in a split second any day and anywhere. Another big benefit is that there’s no dealer to hassle you about it and you won’t be insulting any artist’s feelings. Win or lose, your gold won’t talk back, so it’s 100% headache-free.

Larry Gagosian once said to me: “An art investment can also be a bad investment.” I know he’s right, so I buy the art, not the investment. One day, if you have the “great” art that others covet, you’ll make money and win double.

Now I’m hearing the disturbing rumors that gold is on its way to $2,000 an ounce, but still I’m committed to never being a gold bug, because I don’t like to bet on bad news. I’ll stick to art, though maybe this time it won’t be such a great investment. Still, I’m hoping for a better total return.

editorial@observer.com

IN 2008

By my dad.

I had just been laid off after the literary agent I worked for was poached, but was lucky enough to find a job and not have to file for unemployment only days later. In the interim between paychecks, however, I’d be broke.

“Well, you’ve got those coins lying around,” he suggested.About ten years prior, as a bar mitzvah present, a relative gifted me with an ounce of gold in Australian Roo coins. I had two options: I could borrow the money I needed and pay it off, or trade my father the coins to sell (or do whatever he wanted with them) for the best price I could get quoted.

I needed drinking money. I didn’t need Kangaroo Coins. Who the hell did? Not the 23 year-old who responded:

“SAHARA COINS in Vegas off of Sahara and Teneya. $862.89.”

The email came back:

“Consider it sold--Love, Dad.”

On January 14th, 2008—the next day—gold broke $900 for the first time.

In March, it would break $1,000.

A little over three years later, gold has come close to doubling what it was when I sold it for a bunch of cab rides to Brooklyn, a nice dinner or two, a pair of jeans, and some truly awful nights at the Cherry Tavern. On July 23rd, 2011, gold broke $1600. As of this writing, it’s at $1637.50.

Maybe it’s time for Dad to sell.

“GOLD AIN'T LIKE NOTHIN' ELSE,” Dennis Gartman—famed trader, economist and author of The Gartman Letter—explained over the phone from Suffolk, Virginia.

“Whatever it is, for whatever reason, it is embedded in the DNA of human beings to admire and hold gold. And if you try to ascribe rationality to gold, you’re wrong.”

And what Gartman characterized as irrational human admiration appears to be at an all-time high. Gold prices are rising and may continue to defy the typical physics associated with the success of any asset like it. As long as the market continues to believe in its intrinsic value.

What was simply a Wall Street go-to inflation hedge—or: an investment that theoretically protects against the decreased value of a currency, like the dollar, which has seen better days—has become a pop investing phenomenon. It’s of interest to people who could care less about the goings-on of Wall Street, many of whom can barely distinguish a stock quote from a stock recipe.

And inasmuch as media enthusiasm is a barometer for investment popularity, the headlines have been accumulating faster than a goldbug at the end of a rainbow. A May cover story for the yuppie-centric New York Times Magazine detailed a surveyor: “Gold Mania in the Yukon,” was the headline. On the cover: “The hunt for the world’s most primitive form of wealth starts here.” An April headline from the front page of the Wall Street Journal: “World is Bitten by the Gold Bug.” On Monday, in the Accessories section of Women’s Wear Daily: “New High for Gold Prices.”

Gold even had its own celebrities now, the kind less famous for their investment ideas than they are their mugs. For a period of time, Glenn Beck so relentlessly shilled for the yellow stuff both on his show and in commercials for consumer gold trade-in service Cash 4 Gold that it merited a December 2009 segment on The Daily Show. This was almost a full calendar year after Cash 4 Gold purchased a 30 second ad during—what else?—the Super Bowl.

It was the same month the Journal reported on a woman named Margaret Petrucell, the founder of It’s a Gold Mine Party, LLC. In the great tradition of Tupperware and Mary Kay and Avon, suburban housewives were having parties to sell their gold and walk away with shopping money. The founder, who before starting her business, was laid off by Goldman Sachs’ mortgage division, joked that “What happens at a gold party stays at a gold party.”

But it doesn’t. If anything, gold mania has spread like a contagion.

A few months ago, at a small fete for Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell’s new book, the party’s host, Bright Lights, Big City author and Manhattan gadabout Jay McInerney—swaying about in a white tuxedo jacket—joked to The Observer that he had started his own hedge fund. “I think I’m just going to be a goldbug!” he said.

In the unlikely event Jay McInerney was, in fact, a goldbug, he would have made a small profit in the intervening months. Same with Glenn Beck and Cash 4 Gold, or one of the many multiplying outlets you’ll find to sell off your gold like it, now with brick and mortar locations in strip malls across America. Even in Chinatown, among the district’s famously sketchy wares—the cheap, fake approximation of Prada clutches and rainbow-stamped Louis Vuitton bags—there are signs that note in flashy capital letters WE BUY GOLD. In late May, Utah legislators frustrated over federal economic policy legalized the use of gold and silver as currency. From uptown to Chinatown to Provo and beyond, everyone’s going for the gold. And it seems that anything the economy does could potentially be good for it.

“Everything through the gold window is like a house of mirrors,” said CNBC reporter and NetNet editor John Carney. “If because of the bad economy it looks like we’re headed towards a period of deflation, that should be bad for gold. But it could be good for gold. We’ve been in a period for a while where everything is good for gold. “It’s actually a joke on Twitter,” he continued. “#BuyGold. ‘Rabid squirrel bites girl in town. Buy Gold!’ And literally, if you had followed that advice all along, you would’ve made a lot of money!”

“Gold has proven to be a superman investment. It can leap over buildings and do things that investments aren’t supposed to do. And it’s laughing at us.”

But there are some very un-funny implications. In 2009 at the Davos Economic Summit, Yale Economist Robert Shiller read off a checklist of Bubble Behavior, among which are: soaring beyond the economic and culture saturation point at which other hyper-inflated markets have crashed (check), sharp increases in value (check), envy-inspiring stories of those earning money among those who aren’t (check), and “new era” theories explaining why now is the time to get in (check). Despite all of this, gold has continued to rise.

And as a function of that, some people are still laughing their way to the bank.

Last November, David Einhorn—the Greenlight Capital wunderkind who started his fund with less than $1M and who just acquired a stake in the New York Mets (if that isn’t a sign of money to burn, what is?)—revealed in an interview with Wealthtrack that gold was the biggest position in his fund (Mr. Einhorn declined comment for this piece). According to the New York Times, hedge fund all-star John A. Paulson netted $5 billion in 2010 thanks to securities that represent a chunk of gold larger than the holdings of the Australian government or the whole of Bulgaria. Even after billionare George Soros shifted his position on gold this year, Mr. Paulson stayed the course, putting more money into AngloGold Ashanti, the world’s third-largest gold producer. Employee capital reportedly represents 42% of his Paulson Gold Fund, which deals exclusively in gold-related or gold-backed investments.

Even the great state of Texas—ever famously oil money—is bowing before the golden gods: the University of Texas Endowment Fund currently has somewhere under $1 billion of gold bullion stored in a New York City vault.

From Mr. Carney’s vantage point, the value of gold has been driven by the realization of its potential not just as a diversification asset, or an inflation hedge, but the inherent value it holds against shakier propositions.

“Gold isn’t subject to political currents. Even if someone makes a big discovery of gold, the size of the amount of gold in the world, that won’t affect the price, whereas if you take a discovery of something useful—like energy—it could hurt the price of other known sources of natural gas in the world. That doesn’t happen with gold. The price of gold isn’t a price of discovery,” he said, “but the size of demand.”

Which brings us to the unique creature known as the Goldbug—a being consumed by demand and unmistakable even in an already frothy market. That creature for whom there is one answer for light, life, and wealth in the universe: the yellow, shiny one. They move in packs, and can generally be found vehemently defending their sworn protector and source of wealth against anything that stands in its way. They sometimes sound unhinged.

“I am not a goldbug,” Mr. Gartman is careful to emphatically note. “I don’t like the goldbugs. I think they’re wrong. The goldbugs think the world is going to come to an end,” and some of them, he explains, are real “black helicopter folks.” But that hasn’t stopped him from owning gold. He just doesn’t have to be excited about it.

“It doesn’t make me happy to own gold,” he noted, “but the trend is up. Fight that trend at your own peril,” he explained.

Some have.

Warren Buffett, the king of value investors, would rather invest in a good company with solid yields than gold. He didn’t buy the gospel, telling shareholders at the annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting this year in Omaha: “You can fondle it, you can polish it, you can stare at it. But it isn’t going to do anything.” (This of course caused Mad Money host Jim Cramer to go typically ballistic, calling Mr. Buffett a “grey-beard” investor, and asking why he wouldn’t “give other people a chance to make some money here”.)

Warren Hatch, a partner and strategist at financial research firm Catalpa Capital Advisor, published a position on gold’s long-term look on July 22, noting that the shiny stuff’s underlying look historically and in this instance isn’t so great. In speaking with The Observer, Mr. Hatch compared it to bubbles of past that should serve as more than obvious cautionary tales: “Gold isn’t going up because of a fundamental reason,” he noted. “Mark Twain once said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Five years ago at a cocktail party, people more likely than not would’ve been talking about all the real estate they’re buying.” As for the apocalyptic theories, he conceded that “there are a lot of people who are lobbying more who want to go back to a gold standard, but that argument is completely separate from what gold prices are doing now. For that to even be seriously considered, we would have to be in a far different situation than we are today.” The odds of that happening, he explained, “are miniscule.”

Many of Wall Street’s major institutional investors were still reluctant to get in on it, explained Mr. Carney. “It kills them to think they’ve passed up a profit, but they’re worried that anything that’s gone up 200% over two years could go down 200% over two weeks. It doesn’t make sense that every piece of news is ‘buy gold.’”

Dennis Gartman agreed. “Ask the average Wall Street wiseguy if they’re bullish on gold. They’ll say ‘yeah, you gotta be, we got money problems [with the dollar].’ If you ask them how many hold gold? Very few,” which is where he sees a weakness and potential for an overvalued asset. “It’s a bubble in interest, not in owning. It’s fascinating: everybody’s bullish, but very few are long.”

If they are few, they are prominent, and as convinced of the value of gold as ever. Ben Davies, CEO of London-based investment fund Hinde Capital which maintains the Hinde Gold Fund—the core investment of which is physical gold in a Swiss bank—sees gold hitting $2,000 in four months, and then some. To him and others like him, it’s not just an inflation hedge, but a way of life you’ll soon be adopting.

“This will go beyond popular culture,” Mr. Davies wrote over email from London. In his writings, he didn’t sound apocalyptic. In fact, he was frighteningly, cuttingly rational in his thinking.  The way he saw it, the global economy was in a transitional stage, a maturing phase, the same way one’s voice got deeper as they got older. There were no apocalyptic undertones, but there was a distinct New Age-y feel. “The internet reformation has reconnected individuals with the truism that ‘the desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and knowledge.’ Sounds earnest, doesn’t it? Well,” he wrote. “it’s meant to be—a sound monetary system based on gold is not subject to confidence of the faith and credit of anyone.”

“It cannot be printed or subject to some (mis)interpretation of accounting rules. Neither is it subject to bankruptcy of banks or governments. The physical is not subject to the rules and subversion of exchanges, regulators, ratings agencies or clearing systems ... Money is a serious business, and gold is money.”

For all of the mystical intonations, he was simply saying that it’s not a fiat currency.  As Mr. Einhorn cracked wise in November, gold is “the one kind of money [Fed chairman Ben] Bernanke can’t print more of.” So where is it going?

For Mr. Davies, nowhere but up. Gold being celebrated at cocktail parties, “whether for the right or wrong reasons, is not signaling an end, but a beginning.”

Mr. Carney is less sanguine. “Pigs get slaughtered,” he said.

And Mr. Hatch even more so. “It’s going to be a textbook example of the Greater Fool theory: when the price of something becomes divorced from its underlying fundamentals, and the reason the price is going up is because you can find someone else who’s willing to pay a higher price for it. What you’re doing is finding a greater fool than you to buy it. And eventually,” he said, “the fools run out.”

At one point in our conversation, Mr. Gartman stopped me. “Write this down,”

He grew quiet.

“Gold will stop going up when it does,” he exhaled. “That’s it. That’s all there is to know.” Okay.

As for Dad, it was unlikely that he was parting with the Roo I sold him anytime soon--but not because he was pursuing a new career in gold speculation. “Your dead cousin gave it to you,” he said. “It’s a keepsake.”

It was as good a reason as any to go long.

fkamer@observer.com |@weareyourfek

• Gold set another record high today. That makes four records in four days, putting the yellow metal on pace to become the Jerry Rice of commodities. [Reuters]
• Bank of America and PNC Financial, who in addition to being some of the nation's most avid implementers of foreclosure moratoriums are shareholders in BlackRock, sold $8.3 billion worth of stock in the asset-management behemoth. [Bloomberg]
• Former Federal Reserve Chairman "Tall" Paul Volcker says that there really isn't much hope for a quick reduction in America's uncomfortably high unemployment rate. [AP]
• Fun fact about epically low interest rates: They are crippling affordable-housing projects across the country. [NYT]
• Remember when yield-chasers were piling into junk bonds like clowns into a Volkswagen Beetle? Well, now hedge funds are fleeing junk just as fast as they can, while Main Street types are buying like the dickens. Good luck, Main Street! [WSJ]

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

mtaylor@observer.com

Twitter: @mbrookstaylor

Pardon my French, but !@#$ gold! Jeez! I am so frustrated right now that I broke a five-day winning streak all because investors are starting to get freaked out. Just because the Federal Reserve hinted that it's worried about deflation, people stop putting money in stocks and start clamoring for the shiny yellow stuff.

I get that people reach for the bouillon when they're worried about impending economic doom. And sure, there's a lot to worry about. But c'mon, a new record high?!

I know, I know, I should relax. A 22-point loss isn't anything to cry about, all things considered. Twelve of my stocks went up (out of thirty). One of the big drags on my portfolio was Microsoft, which raised its dividend today. But either investors already knew that was coming or the amount of the increase wasn't enough. The stock lost 2.2 percent.

Economic conditions remain worrisome, too. The Federal Housing Finance Agency said today that home prices dropped half a percent in July. Fantastic. And although the jury's still out on how well the Obama economic team has handled the economy, I'm still a little queasy from not knowing who's going to replace Larry Summers and Herb Allison.

Anyway, it just sucks to have such a great streak going and see it break just because of extreme uncertainty, light volume and hardly any positive economic indicators. Would've preferred to keep the party going.

Till next time,

The Dow Jones Industrial Average