Never Buy Another Stock Again: The Investing Portfolio that Will Preserve Your Wealth and Your Sanity

1. Starting Over

“Managing money is difficult, time-consuming, draining, and a totally alien experience for almost everyone who has come out of the educational system of the United States, where, if you are lucky, you may have learned the difference between a stock and a bond.”

Jim Cramer, Jim Cramer’s Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World, 2005

Visitors to this planet from another galaxy in the late 1990s or through most of the last decade would have probably bet the national pastime was not baseball, football, or any other sport, or even reality television—but the stock market. Investing has long since ceased to be the boring activity your grandparents and parents engaged in (usually by purchasing safe securities like zero-coupon ...