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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Collector1966, post: 1280101, member: 17919&quot;]You can think all you want about a stock, but it is all for naught if the company lies about its results, or engages in &quot;creative bookkeeping&quot;, or dilutes its stock with more stock, or sells products or services that go out of style. </p><p><br /></p><p>As you said, things are different today. The SEC is pretty toothless when it comes to punishing companies that lie about their results. And the name of the investment game today is make the numbers at all costs, which is often to the long-term detriment of the company. To make the numbers in today&#039;s economy usually means laying off employees, or offshoring jobs, which hurts morale at the US operations and further weakens the US domestic economy. And CEO&#039;s and other executives who in earlier years would have been unceremoniously sacked for running a company into the ground are today given golden parachutes that reward them handsomely even if their company goes to pot.</p><p><br /></p><p>And this talk about &quot;stocks&quot; is meaningless if specifics aren&#039;t mentioned. The generic term &quot;stocks&quot; covers a wide spectrum of equities, ranging from so-called &quot;blue chips&quot; to OTC stocks that may be on their last legs. The &quot;blue chips&quot; are supposed to be the safest, but even they can crash and burn, as has been witnessed very recently with GM and Citigroup. Really, you cannot possibly predict what &quot;stocks&quot; are going to do over the next year, let alone the next 25 years, given what has happened in the past 10 years.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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