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.