How to invest like a cockroach - Brett Arends's ROI - MarketWatch

How to invest like a cockroach - Brett Arends's ROI - MarketWatch:

To put it in a nutshell, Grice has advice for all of us: Don’t be a cat on a hot tin roof…be a cockroach.



Say what?



“Cockroaches get bad press,” Grice wrote in his research paper (“Cockroaches for the Long Run,” SG Securities, November 2012). “They’re pests. We don’t want them in our houses. Mainly, we want to kill them.” But, Grice added, cockroaches have one remarkable and underappreciated feature.



They’re survivors. And how.



They’ve been around for 350 million years—which means they have so far survived 7,000 times longer than the human race. They’ve outlasted the dinosaurs, and millions of other species. They’ve survived three of the five “mass extinctions” that have swept the planet, each of which wiped out about three-quarters of the other species. “They can go without air for 45 minutes, survive submerged underwater for half an hour, survive freezing temperatures and withstand 15 times more radiation than humans.”



No, they are not clever or inventive. But as Grice notes, cockroaches can survive a nuclear blast--even if they can’t build a nuclear bomb.



Grice’s cockroach is a portfolio divided into four equal parts: Stocks, bonds, cash (i.e. deposits or Treasury bills), and gold bullion.

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