I trust this letter finds you well. (Since the mailman was able to drop off your Taipan January issue, Y2K must have been a tempest in a teapot...)

As I am writing this letter (a day before Christmas Eve), the much-anticipated Y2K build-up hasn't materialized. The lines at my bank's ATMs are people requiring cash earmarked to be blown on Pokemon starter kits, thighmasters, and fruitcakes... the Price Club is well stocked with anything from gallon jugs of soy sauce to three-layered clouds of toilet paper... and your telephone still rings while you sit down to dinner.

And while I am aware that January 1, 2000, is still more than a week away, I feel safe in speculating that Y2K -- much like the other Great Debacles of 1999... the Dow 10K Crisis... the collapse of the stock market... and the Great San Francisco Earthquake -- turned out to be a mild breeze from the North rather than a hurricane...

Over the last couple of years, I have been diligently following what my colleagues in the newsletter industry had to say about Y2K. Some took it very seriously... Seriously enough to sell their houses, neglect their businesses, and move out into the sticks armed with tubfuls of detergent, barrels full of toilet paper, and enough ammunition to last a drug dealer in Baltimore City for an entire afternoon.

In a way, I've always had the lurking suspicion that at the bottom of Y2K was not the programming fault itself, but the very human tendency to get entangled in logical-seeming cause-and-effect strings... a fascination with unraveling the fabric of "the world as we know it" based on one underlying "bullet-proof" assertion of truth.

(To be fair, it's not just Y2K that provided the grain that was covered in layers upon layers of shiny rationalizing mother-of-pearl sequences. Other examples of dogmatic truth in recent years have been the stubborn assertions that the markets were to crash and burn any minute now... because of P/E ratios, debt, you name it...)

I think what made Y2K so attractive is how nicely the purported salvation dovetailed with the post-romantic delusion that life in the country would hold the silver bullet to all of the Computer Age's ills: Liquidate your assets, buy a farm in the Ozarks, grow your own non-hybrid grain, and recapture Mayberry before Opie took off to Hollywood on a Harley Davidson...

Of course, the rustic idyll itself is just another myth us city folk like to dream about. But few who try it would do it again. (A friend of mine, Nick Evangelista, conducted such a drastic lifestyle change back in '85, when he moved from Los Angeles to a farm in the Ozarks. He just published his and his family's experiences in a wonderful little book called Blood-Lust Chickens and Renegade Sheep: A First-Timer's Guide to Country Living (Loompanics, 1999, ISBN 1-55950-197-9; you can buy it at www.loompanics.com)... which I highly recommend even if you are only occasionally dreaming of Arcadia.)

But no matter if you're finding yourself stranded on a 3-year supply of baked beans or chomping at the bit to head into the fray of the Year 2000, there's one thing my colleagues and I at Taipan have made the philosophy we live by:

No matter how bad things get, the world is full of opportunity for those bold enough to pursue it. And as we're heading into our 13th year in print, we at Taipan have planned to let you in on even more opportunities. Starting in February 2000, we will be adding new features to Taipan that will help you not only to make profits...but also to keep them intact and use them to build true personal wealth.

Happy hunting in the Year 2000,

J. Christoph Amberger
Publisher, TAIPAN

P.S.: The February issue of Taipan, scheduled to mail January 25, will give you a complete summary of all of our 1999 investment picks. So make sure you don't miss the review and recommendations for further action!