It's who you know, not what you know

Guys, gals – it’s story telling time because the markets offer no good news. Please donate a dollar to your favorite charitable organization if you like my story. If you don’t like it, buy yourself half can of coca-cola to relax yourself. Half? Yeah, no kidding – inflation-mah.

I can’t recall exactly how I got into stock market. It was described to me as a very mystified place -- a place that makes a man richer in a very mysterious way, if you have got some gold. In my time, those men driving 280 can shout the loudest. All men will listen to them attentively. Just hang on to every words of these prosperous gods have to say. They all said, it’s all about who you know and not what you know. Who you know will make you richer. A word from who you know will make you 10 times richer. Stock price don’t fly. They rocket. It was that fast, no exaggerations. What you know will only make you rich spiritually but poor materially. Choose carefully, my son, happiness or one-pack stomach filled? So forget about being a book worm, go and rub shoulders.

Poor man cannot “play” in a stock market. All they can afford was playing imaginary numbers game, taking mental notes, counting “paper” gains. Father will tell his son, if I have bought this stock and that stock, we are already living in a bungalow, driving 280 and “rinse” our mouths with shark fins.

They can only dream that one day they can bump into someone who will invite them to their exclusive club. In my time, all we know was price. Newspaper was only stock quote that we can get. It’s hard to even see a stock price trend unless we plot it on a piece of graph paper. I never heard of such thing called research paper. I thought it was probably a piece of 41/2 x 3” pink paper of ampat-ekor betting paper from illegal operators that my grand parents or parents asked me to buy. Every stock is pretty much like that, somebody will pay you money when your number strikes.

Such was my faint memories about stock market many years ago. Come to think of it, it’s still pretty much the same today but only in slightly different forms.