Gambling Lesson from Lehman Brothers

Lehman Brothers, that stalwart financial institution, a landmark on Wall Street alongside other banking giants such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Merrill Lynch, has gone bust. The world is stunned. How could such a thing occur? What happened to the government watchdogs and the bank's own regulatory supervisors? Could the financial markets be facing meltdown?

It will take many months, if not years, before the recent banking crisis with its credit crunch and toxic mortgage-backed securities runs its course. Nobody can predict the future, but it's likely to get worse before it improves.

Many consider banks to have been one of the safest forms of investment for those lucky enough to have savings to invest in the stock market. Buy bank shares, the pundits all cried. There's nothing like investment in bricks and mortar. Wrong, and wrong again...

Gambling lessons learned
Like any stock market investment, or indeed any investment where the underlying commodity can go up as well as down, shrewd decision making requires technical and fundamental market knowledge. Those people who buy in May and go away, as the old market expression goes, will have had their fingers burnt. Financial investment is not just a one-way street. Without the knowledge, investment in stocks and shares is just like investing in the spin of the roulette wheel, or on the next hand in a game of poker.

Nobody can call gambling investing, but playing casino with our investments is precisely what many bankers have been doing in Wall Street for the last ten years.