Читать книгу Attention. Deficit. Disorder. - Brad Listi - Страница 19

This was the second straight year that I’d lost someone during the holidays. My grandfather had died the year before, on Christmas Eve 1998. My mother’s father. We called him Granddad. He was in a hospital bed, alone, when he slipped into The Void. My grandmother had been sitting at his bedside for hours on end. Then, at about 9:00 p.m., she went home to get some rest. Granddad drifted away a couple of hours later, in the dark of night, when nobody was looking.

A month later, each of his grandchildren received roughly $6,000 in ExxonMobil stock. Ticker symbol: XOM.

petroleum n.

A thick, flammable, yellow-to-black mixture of gaseous, liquid, and solid hydrocarbons that occurs naturally beneath the earth’s surface. Can be separated into fractions including natural gas, gasoline, naphtha, kerosene, fuel and lubricating oils, paraffin wax, and asphalt, and is used as raw material for a wide variety of derivative products.

I was wary of owning an oil stock, worried it would be tantamount to owning wars and pollution. Immediately, I called Horvak out in San Francisco. Horvak was a couple of years older than me and had been working in the financial sector for Charles Schwab. With his assistance, I opened an online brokerage account and cashed out of Exxon with the push of a button. In an instant, all of my oil stock was gone, converted directly into cash. Horvak then informed me that I didn’t want to have all that cash sitting around, because cash left to generate meager interest in a savings account would be “dying cash,” on account of something called the “rate of inflation.”

rate of inflation n.

The rate of change of prices (as indicated by a price index) calculated on a monthly or annual basis. Also known as inflation rate.

I told Horvak that I didn’t want my cash to die. Horvak told me to put my cash in a company called eBay. Ticker symbol: EBAY. Horvak had been tracking eBay and said it was a nice place to start, so in February 1999, I purchased $6,201.47 worth of eBay stock at $21.68 per share.

As of late April 1999, the stock had more than doubled in value. The thing took off like a moon rocket. It was the easiest money I’d ever made. Horvak was out of his mind with excitement at the time, trembling with joy and fantasy. Wall Street was going bananas. Stock prices were taking off, IPOs and record highs in every direction. The tech boom was on. Everyone was an optimist, and nobody could lose.

“You wouldn’t believe what’s happening out here,” Horvak said. “People are just throwing money around. It’s stupid. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Horvak was an animal, day-trading aggressively and making a killing. One day he made $50,000 before lunch. At that point, his portfolio was worth more than a quarter of a million bucks. He’d started out a couple of years earlier with practically nothing, and now he was relatively rich. He was planning on quitting his job in a year. He and his girlfriend, Blair, were going to go travel around the world for a long time, purchasing things.

Blair was a hippie chick with a trust fund.