Filed Under: Tickers in this Article: USO For a brief time in
1991, there was no question that I was going to earn a fortune.
By making a few lucky stock and option trades, I had accumulated
a modest sum of trading capital in my brokerage account. Knowing
that the United States was about to invade Iraq, I had no doubts
that the markets would plunge as fears of Iraq's weapons and
military capacity reached a fever pitch around the globe.  I
decided to short the market with all of my meager funds. Knowing
that the U.S. would invade any day, buying put options on the
S&P 100 index provided the most return for when the market
plunged. As fate would have it, my timing on the invasion was
dead on -- the U.S. launched the first airstrike the day after I
purchased the put options.  But I couldn't have been more wrong
with the direction of the market. U.S. stocks skyrocketed on the
invasion news. My puts became completely worthless within an
hour of the market open.  Talk about a difficult but very
valuable lesson. I