(4/16) Non-fungible by Nature
(4/) The following post is part 4 of a super long story about how I came around to crypto. Part 3 can be found here. Part 5 can be found here.
After a bit of time back on Wall Street and in my new position, I finally decided I had enough information to try my hand at the stock market. I was feeling real bold…so I pulled $10k out of my bank account and walked down to the nearest TD Ameritrade, right across the street. Where the lady at the front desk promptly told me “we only accept cashiers checks or money orders.” So I went back and got a check. Opened an account, put my $10,000 in, and gave it a whirl.
For a full year, I traded mostly stocks and futures options. I talked with a bunch of people, priced everything out, looked for deals, and talked to colleagues in every market under the sun.
For a full year, I toiled with all of the information I researched and all the ‘tips’ I heard and all the analysis I wrote and published (for shareholders). I felt I had a leg up on the knowledge if I was actually publishing knowledge for shareholders.
For a full year, I talked with brokers and went to seminars and trading expos and associations. I went out drinking with the richest of the rich and the grunts. I talked with brokers at the company who had been trading financial instruments for years and I’d ask them ‘where can I purchase this security?’ and they’d look at me like I was speaking Swahili. A lot of them had NO idea what I was talking about. But I still talked with everyone I could.
The guy who sat next to me was about 20 years older than me and we’d shoot the shit about stocks and options all the time. At one point, I noticed everyone came to him for financial advice. I overheard him giving some advice I disagreed with and I remember thinking ‘if you really knew this stuff, why are you sitting next to me? wouldn’t you be rich by now?’ He was a nice guy but was in the same boat as everyone else.
Certain things I just couldn’t make any sense of: Company A’s earnings report was good, the stock dropped. Company B’s earnings report was bad, the stock rocketed. Company C’s didn’t have an earnings report but their stock tanked.
‘Why?’
'Because Company A is going to have a shitty Q2 and Company B is going to have a great Q2. And Company C is in this clinical phase and hope to come with something great tomorrow.’
Huh? Are we reading the future now? How could you possibly know what any of this actually amounts to? And how (or why) does any of this make any sense?
One of my best friends in the world - an Energy broker - gave me so much bad financial advice that I ended up giving it up altogether. He told me to sell all of my shares of Facebook at $37. I put up a great argument - ‘they’re going to own everyone’s personal data’, but he just didn’t understand the way the internet worked and convinced me to sell through sheer force of will. And I listened to him!
The thing is…nobody actually knew what was going on, but plenty of people had an opinion. So at the end of my first year as a ‘trader’…I learned…the financial markets just weren’t for me. My brokerage account after a year was right around where it started: $9,998. What a waste of time and effort. This stuff wasn’t made for me to win. It was made for the banks to win.
The saga continues…part 5.