2013+1 ? What a Difference a Year Makes and 3 New Trade Ideas to Get Started!

Happy New Year!   We ended 2013 with a bang.  As you can see from Dave Fry's SPY chart, the last hour was all window-dressing but we couldn't quite get to 1,850 on the S&P, closing at 1,848.36 for the year, up 29.1% in 12 months, which was a big 7.5% behind the small-cap leadership of the Russell, which finished the year officially at 1,1656,64, up 36.6% or an average of 3.05% each and every month of the year! If we take just $100,000 and compound it at a rate of 3.05% per month for 10 years, we get $3.64 MILLION Dollars .  10 years later, it's $132.7M and 10 years after that, we have $4.8Bn so, if you want to be a multi-Billionaire in 30 years, just put $100K into the Russell and go fishing, I suppose. That's what the Pundits and Financial Advisers are telling you when they say last year was " normal " or that we have a " new paradigm " and it's OK to chase performance, despite the fact that history has shown us, over and over and over again – that it's usually not.  My very simple investing premise for 2014 is to buy the worst performer of 2013, which is gold, which fell 28.2% for the year.  It seems to me that if everyone who has $100,000 today and sticks it into an index fund has $4Bn in 30 years, they might choose to buy something shiny for their spouse down the road.   As we noted on Tuesday , there are 373M people in the World with more than $100,000 today and they average, if you include the top 29M (the top 0.4%) they average $491,689 each so, by bullish market logic, they should have an average of $23.8Bn each in 30 years and that's $8.87 QUADRILLION or 40 times more money, just for the top 5%, than there is TOTAL in the World today.   So, if the markets are going to continue to go up, I humply submit that there MAY be just a little more inflation on scarce things that rich people like to buy.  Stocks are one of those things, of course and art and, of course, GOLD!