It seems like every day you hear another doom and gloom headline. Underwater mortgages. Debt ceiling crisis. Riots in Greece. Maybe even something like this.
"'Sally Cameron thought she had done everything right,' wrote Kevin Carey last week, retelling a story he read in the Washington Post. 'But when she hit the job market, her Ivy League management degree didn't seem to matter. The worst recession in decades had pushed the unemployment rate to nearly 10 percent and good jobs were scarce. Sally paid the rent by tending bar and filled her time with volunteer work.'"
But of course that quotation isn't from 2011, or even 2008. It's from 1982. Sally Cameron is currently a successful manager for a consulting company. Boom and past cycles come and go; the trick is to position yourself so that you can profit from them regardless of the overall market direction. A wise businessman named Levi Strauss made a fortune by selling equipment to prospectors. It didn't matter if the people who bought his tools found gold or not; Strauss made money either way. You can do the same if you stand apart from all the mad frenzies, the fear and greed, and dispassionately observe what's going on.
You can read about more apocalyptic predictions that failed to come to pass over at The Motley Fool.
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