Is the patient out of intensive care?

September 11th, 2009

Is it possible that the recession is ending?

Is it possible that while we were busy squandering wealth on unnecessary luxuries and on defense systems that we will hopefully never use, we unknowingly created a super-strong economy with a built-in anti-virus? According to my scant stock exchange knowledge, things are looking a lot better than they were a few months ago. It seems that an economic recovery is under way. Perhaps I’m being naïve because I don’t really understand what’s going on but my own little portfolio is showing signs of revival. A couple of years ago while on a trip to Canada I looked up an old friend. His wife was very ill and he would not leave her side, so to fill his days he played the stock market. He led into his study with consisted of a long desk and a row of computer screens all flashing with activity.

His profitable pastime

He sat in a chair with castors and zoomed up and down the screens buying and selling shares. I asked where he got his information from and he gave me the name of a share advisory service. He said that they were very accurate and that he followed their advice as long as his budget permitted. “I’m doing excellently, thanks. These advisors are great and the exchange keeps going up and everything’s fine. Except my poor wife, who is dying a little every day.”

I try it.

I returned home enthusiastic at the prospect of making some money. I joined his share advisory service, signed up with a broker, opened an account and started trading, following advice that rolled in every day from the service. My total portfolio was $6,000 and I promised myself that I would not put another penny into it. It worked well, not as dramatically as I had thought but it was a steady climb to $7,000 in the space of 12 months. Not bad, right?

Melt-down

Then came the melt-down. Because I didn’t heed the warnings and because my share advisory service kept telling me what to buy and what to sell, I sat and watched my $7,000 dwindle day by day until it hit about $2,500. I felt sick, stopped watching it and wrote it off as an expensive lesson. One day I saw that shares in the Ford Auto company were down to just $1.50. I bought a hundred with cash in the account and sold them at $2.50 and made a $100. They dropped again and I repeated the procedure making another $100. Doing this with a couple of other cheap shares I got my portfolio up to $3,000. I threw away the mail from the share advisory service.

Recovery?

Last night my portfolio stood at $6,500 and I am excited. I’m back to doing a little trading and things are looking up. The question in my mind is the economy out of intensive care or is it in temporary remission?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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