All I Need to Know About Stocks, I Learned from Mr. Freshwater.
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All I ever learned about the stock market I learned from one of my teachers, a judicious man named Ross Freshwater. He pushed me to be a lawyer in the senior year mock trial, as well, when all I wanted to do was sit in the background and write the testimonies. I ended up loving every second of playing lawyer, and hope Mr. Freshwater knows I now see the wisdom in his being kind of a hard-ass about it.
Anyway. The first quarter of senior year was spent faux-playing the stock market. At the end of ten days spent in a trader’s haze – eyes bloodshot from hours staring at digital readouts and throat raw from shouting too much, or so I imagined – whichever team of four or so students had made the best stock choices, would get a ten-dollar prize for their burgeoning cognizance of when to buy or sell. As someone consistently hard-pressed for cigarette money, ten dollars sounded nice; it’s the little things in life that keep me going. Wasn’t that the point of the stock market? Read the fine print, find out who’s doing what and with how much money – and then put your money on the big picture, and watch it expand. Or not. I knew how to play poker by the time I was six – I know gambling when I see it.
Surprisingly, I began to care about it. Checked the papers for companies on the rise, the rollercoaster ride of numbers. Skipped a class or three to jot down to the library and peruse the stocks while burning Placebo mix CDs for friends. I thought carefully about every ‘investment’ before I made it – would this or that medicine company’s recent bad press affect their worth? Will a fast food chain’s latest deal turn my one dollar into seven by tomorrow morning? Really reading the news and really thinking about it, from that nervous and addicted standpoint, was not always comfortable. Every little detail mattered. No ten dollars was worth this kind of stress, Newports be damned…yet there was an intriguing little thrill that came with opening the paper the next morning and seeing even a small percentage of a spike. It gave me this euphoric sense that not only was all right with the world, but somehow I was at last a little ahead of the game, a tiny bit more on top of things than usual. I suspected that high school was finally paying off, in that I had finally learned something practical.
When the ten days were up, my team won. When we took a close look at the numbers, it turned out I’d done the best of all of us. So I finally acquired Newports and with them, a strange new addiction. Against all personal odds of better things I could’ve been doing at the time, I found myself checking the numbers for the next week or so, just for the hell of it, to see what could’ve been if it had been actual money invested. Some were good, some were bad. Oh, the excitement of it all! I suppose I got tired of it eventually, but for a couple weeks there I felt like a junkie. That was five years ago, and I’ve not read The Wall Street Journal, or even ever purchased stock. But the lessons learned while I was aware of the game have stuck with me.
Someone I know recently purchased a decent amount of stock in Tesla Motors, a mere day later than he intended to. Slight panic ensued – concepts of up and down, gains and losses. I can’t profess to understand it all that well. But I told him not to worry. Maybe I’m just a sucker for anything with Tesla’s name on it, but to me it seems like he made a very sensible long-term investment. Day to day, it might be a little harder to see the benefit, but a stock choice should be a well-meant commitment aside from a well-educated financial decision. It used to be that way – people would invest wisely and with at least some thought behind it, and some heart as well. Investments were real investments, not something we’d bounce from place to place every other day. Tesla Motors is, my friend feels, well worth supporting because he believes in what they’re doing. It is truly worth the investment on all fronts.
I say the less he worries about the day to day, the better. I once knew a lovely lady who was unfortunate enough to be dating a real pig who just happened to deal with stocks for a living. Now, I don’t know much about the trading floor. I occasionally picture it as a lot of burned-out, aging frat boys throwing temper tantrums and using small cannons to shoot coded Gummi Bears at each other – clear for ‘Buy’ and red for ‘Sell.’ I’m sure they’re all doing very serious things down there. But does the average person really want to spend their days that stressed out? Do you want a job where the social norm following a bad day is to leap headfirst out of the highest window in the building? There are people who can sit at a blackjack table for three days in a row and not feel a damn thing. Stock people seem to really care about what’s happening minute by minute, because…well, I still can’t figure out why. It’s the great American legal gambling system, and if there’s not a 1-800 help line for traders, someone should probably hop on that.
Am I saying the stock market’s a bad thing? Not at all. I have faith in Tesla Motors, though, and hope taking the leap pays off for my friend. I’d look up some numbers and predictions myself but I make an effort nowadays to keep my addictive personality gently harnessed. – I’ve had just enough coffee today to take anything too seriously. Besides, after five years, I still trust in Mr. Freshwater’s ways. If the main lesson I learned was to observe the stock market from a distance, watching the waves with amusement but never taking the plunge, I’ll heed that. That’s what I took from it, the message that applied to me personally. That’s what a good teacher does: they show you what’s out there and how to go succeed in it, and let you make your own decisions. Thanks to Mr. Freshwater, I learned early on that stock market gambling is just too much for me – however, for those interested, I can always be talked into a few sizzling hands of poker.
