It appears that I have misled you

I promised to post something last Monday and then I did not.

Sorry about that.

There are reasons--involving a messy house and a hobby that doesn't relate to investment except as an object lesson on how NOT to save money--but these are excuses and don't get us any closer to the ultimate goal of amusing discussions about money-related topics.

There will be more to follow, if not next Monday, then certainly the one after that.

I appreciate your patience.

Obsessed with mastering games, or how I learned about the stock market

In Grade 1, we learned how to play the game Set, where you race to find a 'set' in a collection of cards.  

 I thought that it was fascinating.

I wanted to find all of the sets, even the multiple sets in the same layout.  Given sufficient time, I was sure that I could find all the sets.

Or any set...

 Eventually the game ended, as all games do.

"I will make a set appear with my mind."

My performance at the game was average, which left me with a feeling of deep dissatisfaction. The game was fun, but I had not yet attained greatness at it.

I needed practise.

She bought me the game, which I played incessantly.

Sometimes other people would play with me.  At first, they went easy on me.

That changed when I turned into an unbeatable set-making machine.

Eventually, being the best set player in my household got boring.

I was never actually THAT good.  But, you know the rules: my blog, my alternate history.

Having mastered the game, it was put away in a corner and forgotten.

In Grade 5 we did a unit at my school on the stock market.  It was the first and last time I ever touched on personal finance at school.

The teacher first tried to explain to a group of kids about what the stock market was. 

We visited the Winnipeg Stock Exchange to see the opening bell ring.

We fake bought a group of shares, picked from the newspaper.

"Well, these columns of numbers sure are boring.  I will pick... that one.  And that other one..."

Then, few weeks later, we fake sold those shares and saw who made a profit.

And I learned that randomly picking stocks is not a good strategy.

As a fun wrap-up, we gathered in groups to play the board game "Stock Ticker".

As with Set before, my performance at the game was average, and I was again left me with a feeling of deep dissatisfaction. The game was fun, but I had not yet attained greatness at it.

Christmas did come, and I did get the game for Christmas.  That year's Christmas featured guests from out of town who brought their two boys along.  

The game is designed so that you can't ever buy as many stocks as you want.  

We bypassed that rule by borrowing copiously from the bank.

Like full-time investing, Stock Ticker is a boring game.

 

 

Not everyone was as enthusiastic about the game as I was.

But all things end and eventually even Stock Ticker's other most devoted fan abandoned the game.

"The game could go on forever," he said.  "It's rigged so that we will win.  The trick is just to keep borrowing money."

I stared at my accumulated wealth, not wanting to stop playing the fun yet boring game.  I could have kept going forever, buying more stocks with the dividends that the stocks paid out.

But the moment was over - we would never again play Stock Ticker.  Yet somewhere deep down I still burned to master the game.

Then I grew up and realized that the real stock market is way more interesting.  It's nice how things work out sometimes.