"Anyone can get old," said Queen Elizabeth II, quoting Groucho Marx on the occasion of her 80th birthday, "all you have to do is live long enough."

We would have put it differently: the secret to getting old is not to die.

And it brings to mind a thought: many of the best things in life are achieved simply by not doing anything. The Queen has ruled with charm, wit, and integrity largely by refusing to get involved in the arguments and follies that have brought so many of her family and her ministers to ruin. She has outdone them all by remaining aloof, doing her duty, and conducting herself with such a dignified restraint you'd hardly know she was part of the government.

"Lethargy just shy of laziness," says Warren Buffett, describing his investment style. He is willing to wait...and wait...and wait...until he finds something he likes. This is not baseball, he says. You don't have to swing at every good pitch. Instead, you can wait for the perfect pitch.

What's the secret to saving? Simple, just don't spend. What's the secret to losing weight? Simple, just don't eat.

The queen waits. Once, she went unannounced into a clothing shop to have a look around. A fellow shopper turned to her and remarked, "You look just like the Queen."

"How convenient," Her Majesty replied.

Investors rarely show that kind of calm. They can't seem to wait. It is as if their money were contaminated with leprosy; they are so eager to get it out of their pockets and into someone else's. And they're not entirely wrong. Money these days - in the form of dollars - has a lethal disease, like leprosy. Day by day, parts fall off, and little by little, it dies away.

Ah, there's the rub. You hold your money in short-term Treasuries. You make no mistake. You do nothing, and still the dollar can sink 20%, 30%, or more. You thought you were 100% insured against loss, but you hadn't counted on the money itself wasting away. That is the trouble with the dollar; it is a faith-based currency. It floats on a sea of faith. When faith goes down, so does your wealth.

But what can you do about it? If you put your money into gold you still have a problem. As we've seen in recently, the price of gold can drop, too
- by more than 20% in only three weeks.

Doing nothing is not easy. The ancient Chinese knew this when they spoke of wu wei, or the path of non-action. It was not really inaction that they were describing, but a kind of flow...spontaneous with no striving, no hard edges:

"The Tao abides in non-action, Yet nothing is left undone," wrote Lao Tzu.

And in much the same way, the secret to investment success is not simply doing nothing at all, because you're always doing something with your money, even when you're trying your hardest not to.

But the secret is you don't have to do much, because unless you're doing a lot of investment research, unless you're very lucky, or unless you have inside information, you're not likely to be able to find the one stock that goes up while the others go down. Nor are you likely to buy commodities when they are at a three-month low and sell them when they are at a three-month high. There are a few traders who can do that. Maybe. But for most people getting in and out of an investment with good timing is a matter of luck. And few people are lucky enough to do it very often.

That's why most people are probably better off believing "you can't time the markets." It's like believing that you can't get away with cheating on your wife; it's not necessarily true, but you're probably better off thinking it is.

Back to Scotland for more thoughts...

*** What are we doing now? Glad you asked. Nothing much. We're just buying gold; we think the price will come back above $700. We just hope we live long enough to see it.

For those too antsy to invest like a Taoist, Richard Russell notes a little known market timing indicator developed in the 1970s by a brilliant trader called Alphier, who identified market bottoms by symptoms of "prolonged liquidation."

"Each week count how many days the S&P closed up and how many days it closed down," writes Russell. "If there is a day that the index is exactly unchanged, give that day the sign of the previous day. Forget about holidays or any day in which the market is closed. Each week go back over the past 14 weeks and count how many total days are up and how many are down. If, in the past 14 weeks there are at least 17 more down days than up days, you have a major bottom and a buy signal.

"That 'formula' worked amazingly well in calling all the major market bottoms since 1932."

And what about today?

Russell points out that on Friday, June 16, 2006, gold had declined eight days in a row and closed down on 10 of 12 days, that is, it was lower on 83.3% of the previous 12 days.

This, he notes, is "very impressive and it implies a downside panic - even capitulation.

"What I'm trying to measure is the degree of fear that has been generated in the gold picture, just as I tried to measure the degree of bullishness generated as gold was topping out on May 11. We'll see how this study works, although, as I said, I would have preferred a longer period of days."

Bill Bonner is the President of Agora Publishing.  For more on Bill Bonner, visit The Daily Reckoning.