It begins, tra la la loop de doo!

I came up with the name of this blog while getting my third massage this week in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

One thinks of more important, or perhaps, more sensual things during their first or second coconut scrub rub while on vacation, but by the third one, the mind tends to wander to strange places. Mine was veering back to returning to New York, and to one of my distractions while I blast out some cardio action on the stationary bike at the Equinox on Lex at 44th, namely, Jim Cramer's Mad Money. I was thinking of his oft-recited line, "Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered." It's a catchy line that doesn't really say anything all that interesting, but excuse me while I run with it for a few paragraphs.

I unpack the line this way: smart investors can make money wagering on stocks moving up or down, but once you lose sight of the fundamentals of a company and try to make too much money off of a move, you're a pig. The dot-com/tech bubble made many people pigs. Law school in the late 90's and its attendant lack of income kept me from being piggy during that period. The 1.2 mil+ cost of an entry-level two bedroom condo in Manhattan is keeping me from hitting the trough with other porkers during this current housing market.

So it seems circumstance is keeping me from being piggish, nothing more. Hey, whenever I talk about visiting Montreal like my bud A-Rob did recently, I can't not bring up the restaurant Au Pied de Cochon and it's delectable choucroute entree. The pig's knuckle is to die for, and still beckons, as does the pigless poutine. Philly is now less about the cheesesteaks from Jim's on South Street and more about the roast pork Eye-talian from Tony Luke's. What I'm saying is I love the pig, I get the draw of the pig, I wanna make the buckets of ducats that a pig can make.

However, I understand the need to fight that tendency by searching out good investment ideas, explaining them in writing in this forum, and defending them in this space, open to the comments/criticism/mocking of everyone who reads this piffle. That's why I'm writing this. My plan is to post investment ideas that catch my fancy and attempt to justify them before dropping hard-earned cash on them. If I can't somehow convince my wife and my friends that I'm onto something financially rewarding in this space, then perhaps I should keep that cash earning 3%ish at INGdirect.

Okay, there's the raison d'etre, the mission statement of this blog.