I will be out of town for the next two weeks. In fact I will be so out of town I won't have 'Net access. Some of the hotels I plan to stay in don't have phones, and some don't even have walls as we know them.
If anyone doubts the power of the Internet to change our lives, think about this. The Web we all know and use has only been available to the general public for about seven or eight years. That's an eye blink. Yet, the idea of the Internet has so permeated our culture that I feel compelled to explain that I will be out of touch, even though I am going on vacation.
Elan Caspi, our Workshop Fool, has been working from France and Israel for the last several weeks. Another of our writers, David Wolpe of the Fool's School area, worked from France for about eight months. The barriers are dropping. What will it be like in another five years? Will I be writing from beneath a palapa roof on the Mayan Riviera -- permanently?
For the next two weeks, Barbara Eisner Bayer will be holding down the fort here, with help from former Foolish Four writers Chris Rugaber, who will be taking a close look at Foolish Four companies and their business prospects, and Bob Price, who will be discussing some of our plans for the CRSP database. I hate to miss it!
But, I don't plan to spend much time thinking about investing or the Foolish Four while I'm gone. That is right in keeping with the whole philosophy behind our mechanical strategies, and all Foolish investing for that matter. You don't need to live and breathe investing. The whole purpose of investing is not to amass a stack of cash, but to amass the means to live a fuller, more interesting, and hopefully more satisfying life.
Even the most frequently traded strategy in the Workshop only requires one afternoon a month to implement, although you need to spend time learning and thinking about it before you commit, of course. You should probably spend a few hours checking on the latest research by the discussion board community, too. But, you don't need to stay glued to CNBC or track your stocks on your cell phone. In fact, you will probably fare better if you don't.
The Foolish Four is a "Gone Fishing" strategy. This year seems to be an excellent time to practice that philosophy. Agonizing over stock performance has never helped anyone's returns. Studying... well that's another matter.
I'm taking some reading material with me -- a couple of fluffy novels and What Works on Wall Street by James O'Shaughnessy. WWWS is the bible of mechanical investing. I read it years ago, but recently I was looking something up in it, and I realized that it made a whole lot more sense now. It was kind of like reading Catch-22 a few years ago, after having read it last in high school. So WWWS is heading south.
Investing books are perfect for summer reading. They are interesting, but not so interesting that they actually keep you awake... unless you want to stay awake. And, you meet very interesting people when toting something by O'Shaughnessy or Benjamin Graham, as opposed to another John Grisham novel.
Fool on and on and on... and prosper!
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