But this is par for the course, it’s a well-known phenomenon, sometimes it just takes a little while for reality to “snap back into place”.

The long-term truth is, his strategy was eventually doomed to falter. At some point the dividends were going to drop too far or the market was going to over-value dividends. He was going to have a rough year.

But the underlying fundamental truth is that his investment strategy was providing very little actual value to the world around him. He’s basically just collecting and living off someone else’s interest payments.

It’s great that he managed to pull it off, but we can’t all pull it off. It simply doesn’t scale that way. We can’t all live off other people’s sweat, somebody has to do the work.

His new strategy of trading options is equally doomed to un-scalable failure. It may continue to work for him for some time, but options trading lacks a distinct element of “creation” that is required for sustainable long-term growth. 15 million Canadians trading options is not going to somehow improve everyone’s quality of life, it’s just going to shuffle around money like a poker game.

And if there’s something that embodies this financial crisis, it’s that underlying truth: Somebody has to do the work. Work is wealth.

So Foster may have to come “back out” of full retirement, but hey he was already writing books, so it’s not like he was doing “nothing” anyways.

And I think it’s silly to sell now, when he’s always advised “buy and hold”. If I had money for this sort of thing I’d be buying dividend stocks (not any other kind) right now, not selling them. He sold them low so he can rebuy them higher when the economy rebounds? Isn’t that the opposite of what you’re supposed to do?