Whole Foods > Portuguese Stock Market

The headline read:

Whole Foods Is Now Bigger Than The Portuguese Stock Market

The free-float method used the total market value of the available stock to calculate the value.  The Portuguese market has fallen 70% since 2007, but, still, to have a single American supermarket company worth more than the entire Portuguese stock market is simply stunning.

A former coworker asked me for an alternative to the stock market.  He was certain that the American economy was going to tank regardless of who wins the election.  How the bleep do I know?  There are corporate bonds, annuities, and other strange things like investing in paying cash for lottery annuities.   (As the words left my mouth I remembered that Scott Rothstein's Ponzi scheme (and his 50 year sentence) was based on paying cash to people who'd won large malpractice awards.) 

This coming on the heels of news reports of the decline in middle class wealth makes me want to pack MREs, flashlights, extra batteries, and toilet paper and head for a cave.