Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and many of our American readers will be stuffing turkeys, picking Christmas trees, and enjoying time away from our crazy markets while they’re closed.
Since I’m visiting family in Belarus (what a change from home in Puerto Rico!), I may get to throw some snowballs with the children myself this year. But the world doesn’t stop spinning for American holidays, so I’ll stay on watch. Paid subscribers will get an alert if anything urgent happens affecting The Independent Speculator portfolio.
Meanwhile, I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you for reading—and more. The questions, the suggestions, the conversations—it’s all a great help and much appreciated.
Better yet is that since I can correspond with my readers now, I do. My business is still small enough that I can answer all my readers’ messages personally. Many of them have become good friends, and more are doing so with each passing month. This is a truly great thing. No success in life is much fun without friends to share it with.
I love my work and I like the people I’m doing it for. Life just doesn’t get much better than that.
But I want to say one more thing. The true story of Thanksgiving is about much more than good-hearted Native Americans helping out starving European settlers. That apparently did happen—I’m neither denying nor dismissing that goodwill. But the big change from starvation and misery to plenty and prosperity came when the original colonies abandoned what were essentially early experiments in communism. The Massachusetts and Virginia colonies had both originally forced everyone to hand the fruit of their labor over to a central agency, which distributed the goods according to government plans. Starvation ensued. When they allowed people to own their own land and benefit from their own labor, both colonies prospered.
So in addition to my family, friends, and others, I want to thank Kent Dillon for his article on the true story of Thanksgiving. The story was new to me when I first read it. I’m always grateful to be relieved of ignorance.
That’s a quality I’ve seen in all the successful speculators I know. We must always strive to see reality as accurately as possible. Ignorance is bad enough; we can’t afford to let wishes, hopes, prejudices, and other fixed ideas get in the way.
Best wishes for a joyful holiday,
