I am lucky to have some extremely intelligent brains to pick at the company I work for. Today, I ate lunch with one of the analysts here, and I mentioned how easy it looked to make money on the stock market – until realizing that the past three months were not exactly representative of how the stock market always performed. He laughed and told me of what happened when he used to work for an investment firm in the mid 1990’s.

His investment firm had a surge of certified financial advisors join up around that time. They had just finished getting that certification, which apparently is a very arduous task, and were thriving on the successful, bullish market of the mid 90’s. Five years later, in 2000, when the bears made their arrival, these people didn’t know what to do with themselves. He said it reminded him of people who came back from a war with post traumatic stress disorder, and that after you been in a foxhole for hours being hit with artillery fire, you had pretty much seen it all.

And I believe that is something very important to remind the younger crowd that is eating up the earnings provided by the current market. You can hear their intense enthusiasm any night between 6:15 and 6:45 on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money on CNBC. It seems to me the same generation that got hooked on Texas Hold’Em as a way to take a certain amount of money and multiply it, are now trying to apply the same thing to the stock market.

I have to admit I am guilty of this myself, as I look at my mock portfolios earning 5 or 10% interest in a month. I even called my dad to share these secrets of easy money on the stock market, before he reminded me that the performance we’ve been over the past year can just as easily turn into what we saw earlier in the decade.