Vern at the Beach: Musings on the Year So Far

The obsessed business owner is never really far from business, regardless of where the body lies. Late last month, as I was frying under the Bermuda sun, my mind started to surf through a lot of the things I had experienced so far this year. Here are some of my observations.

I remember back to 1994, when the S&P was up about 1.3%, but most stocks were under water -- a terrible year. One day, I was percolating through the business section at a nearby Barnes & Noble, looking for some kind of optimistic transfusion. All of a sudden, there it was, Harry Dent's book, The Great Boom Ahead, written the previous year. I thought, "This guy's got a great sense for marketing. Everybody is talking gloom and doom and he's writing about a boom." I bought the book, read it and felt a lot better. Dent is the well-known economic demographer who is riding the crest of the baby boomer phenomenon. Almost everything he predicted in that book has come true.

His next two books, The Roaring 2000s and The Roaring 2000s Investor, develop the same theme: The tremendous number of baby boomers is a major force in driving the market up and up, until the end of the decade. Dent is riding an unbelievable commercial high right now, but I'm bothered by the way he is selling himself. ...