Day Trader Blues

 When I was a lad around 12 years of age I became fascinated with the stock market.  I would hear my father and one of his friends talk about stocks often. My father was a small-time conservative investor of mostly blue chip stocks.  A lot of people dabbled in those days.  

I listened and read and learned as much as I could.  I followed stocks in the daily paper and drew graphs of the ones of which I was interested.. in hopes of detecting money making patterns.  I would often buy a copy of the Wall Street Journal and I would ride my bike to the next town over and visit a small stock exchange office to watch the boards with other local investors.  I must have been quite a site sitting there watching with intensity.  I was a future capitalist in the making.

Wanting to encourage me, my father was proud of my interest and decided to invest $325 on my behalf with the Uniform Gift to Minors section so the stocks would be in my name.  He asked me to come up with a stock to purchase. I had one in  mind as I was not a timid investor.  I had my eye on a company called Andy Guard.  It was a toy company and I watched and enjoyed it volitivity over recent months going from fifty-cents per share to sometimes to sometimes over $2.50per share.  I wanted to ride that dragon, however my father thought he new better with his conservative strategy. My plan was to buy low and sell high a couple times and then switch to another roller coaster with a larger volume.  As I said, my father was a conservative investor.  So he set me up with a company called Astrex which was a company that made electronic vacuum tubes.  He purchased 50 shares for me at $6.50.  

I told him it was a bad idea since vacuum tubes were going to go away with the advent of transistors.  He asked me to trust him.  Over the next couple of years I watched the anemic performance of the stock symbol ASI made little progress in my portfolio.  However like a sun that was about to go nova there was a change near the end.  The stock was having steady gains and when it finally rose to $12.50 per share I begged him to sell; he would not.  It went up to $16 and I told him it couldn't sustain and I begged him again and then it went nova.  With a bright flash it sunk over the he next few weeks where it sat between $2 and 3.50 per share.  It later became a black hole at 50-cents.  

Astrex was then acquired by another company and they offered me $5.00 dollars to buy back my shares or I could keep them and get nothing.  At this point I was an adult and I finally had a choice in the matter.  

What could have been if my father only listened to me and purchased Andy Guard and let me ride that dragon.  Andy Guard eventually went belly up as well, but I knew when to get out of that one. My charts were undeniable proof that I understood the patterns of the market.

The residual bitterness of that experience of powerlessness changed me into a non investor even to this day.

 I'm glad I didn't become a vlogger.  In an earlier post you may have seen I was considering starting a Youtube channel, but thankfully I came to my senses.  Yes, I am retired now and I pretty much do what I want when ever I want.  I prefer to take things on with my full attention and not have the distraction of  how to turn all of my situations into content for the channel.  I don't have to set up my Gopro or wear one on my forehead like a tefilln.  I don't have to set up other cameras and iphones to capture it all and then go through the process of editing and posting.  I don't have to consider merch...

Case in point, something of a new experience happened the other day which would have made some good content, but I probably would have ruined everything in the process.  I was working with my backhoe the other day digging a hole in one of my fields in search of finding the water level before the rains came.  I found water at a depth of three feet and that is probably the level where it will be during the summer when I'd like to pump water to irrigate a field to keep the grass growing for the horses.  anyway a hydraulic hose blew on on the backhoe and I had to shut everything down quickly to prevent emptying the hydraulic reservoir onto the earth.

At that point the tractor was dead and I couldn't move it to a convenient area to work on it.  Though the backhoe has it's own isolated fluid system I could disengage it, but the problem was that I would need to run the system to raise the bucket and the outriggers arms which would purge more fluid.  

So I drag out some tools to remove the broken hose, then take a drive to England Marine and  $51 dollars later I have a new hose and then I was off to Auto Zone to buy a gallon of 10W-40 for another 30 dollars and I was back in business.  That is the recommended fluid for the backhoe.  Did you know that 10W-40 is actually hard to find these days?

Well, a half hour later I an home and back in business.  I scooped up the small amount of contaminated soil with the loader and put it on the burn pile to be purified with fire.  I am sure this would have all made good video content for tractor, backhoe and hole digging enthusiasts, but they will just have to read about it here.  and yes, there are these types of enthusiasts on Youtube.  That's where I go for such videos.  Hell, I even subscribe to two saw mill vloggers.  Sounds dull but it is anything but.

In conclusion, you won't be able to see a video of this adventure, but I leave it to the readers of this to picture it in your minds.  That is all for now...