I have no problem agreeing with all that.

When a person is young and has time to make up for mistakes, being highly diversified dilutes his best skills and abilities. It makes sense for a younger person to find out what they are good at and "go for it". Once a person has reached a certain level of success, a level that they are "comfortable" with, it gets harder to "go for it" knowing that if he fails it is going to be much harder to start over. Some of the extremely successful people (as well as some that have had big failures) never get to that stage. They have that internal drive to always get to the next level. "Comfortable" often times means mediocre. And a lot of people are happy with that, including me. I don't have desires to be a multi-billionaire. When in this stage, being diversified in investments means being a lot less likely to loose enough so that lifestyle is severely affected. Having some cash is a good diversification. My wife and I have a lifestyle we are very comfortable with. Not lavish by any means, but it suits us. Being diversified also means my holdings in aggregate are unlikely to outperform whatever portion of the economy does the best. Can't "shoot out the lights" being diversified.

Holding some cash is a good idea. If currency was a sound currency that held its value it would even be a better idea. At least for the time being it looks like the USD is holding value against other currencies well, and likely will until/unless things get a lot worse. I also think things are going to get worse before they get much better.

Funny you should mention fishing. I've done more fishing this year than all previous years combined. Built a 3 acre pond out behind the house for wife to gaze at last year and figured a pond should have some fish in it. So kind of got into raising the fish. None of them very big yet (bluegill and red ear sunfish up to about 8" and large mouth bass 14") but have enjoyed catching them to see how well they have been doing. Hand feed around the pond about every day. One of my close friends said he could never imagine me getting interested in fishing. Sometimes I even surprise myself.

John