A day at the seaside, at Port Mulgrave with the National Trust. After the blip of yesterday, lovely sunshine again.
It is whispered—by those who still have the energy to be shocked—that Trump and his merry band of grifters quietly offloaded large chunks of their share portfolios just before he decided to slap tariffs on anything that moved. Then, after the predictable nosedive, they swooped back in to pick up the bargains, which are now going sky high. Pure coincidence, no doubt. One imagines them clinking glasses over the wreckage.
This tale of high-level self-interest reminded me of my own brush with the world of high finance. I tried to recount it to my wife. She said she had heard it before and returned to her book, unimpressed. So I shall burden you with it instead.
Picture it: 1987. A dozen of us in the office, each flinging in about £100 to join a Shares Syndicate. We met weekly, brimful of misplaced confidence, to pore over penny shares and pretend we were financial visionaries. Settlement with the broker came at the end of the month in those days.
The moment of glory—or disaster—came when we decided to sell a thousand shares in something called Consolidated Gold Mine. At 25p a share, no less. A tidy profit. We executed the sale and toddled off for the weekend feeling quite pleased with ourselves.
(At this point, I feel compelled to point out that my memory is, after nearly forty years, of course a foggy mess when it comes to the exact name and price—but surely you can piece together the general idea without a PowerPoint presentation.)
Then came Monday. Black Monday. You may recall it. The global stock market decided it had had enough and threw itself into the void.
This, of course, would have been bad enough. But then we discovered that we had not sold the 25p shares of Consolidated Gold Mine at all. We had sold Consolidated Gold Fields at £25 a share. Which, crucially, we did not own. We had inadvertently shorted £25,000 worth of fantasy.
There was a brief moment of silence in the office, punctuated only by the sound of someone frantically doing sums on a calculator and someone else quietly swearing. We considered a whip-round, perhaps even a small, polite panic. Bankruptcy was not uncertain, but it had started peering through the blinds.
And then, miraculously, the crash continued. Share prices continued to plummet. By the middle of the week, those phantom £25 shares had tumbled so far that we could buy the required thousand of them for a fraction of the cost. By the end of the month, when the book was settled, we had accidentally made a profit of around £17,000.
The syndicate limped on for a while after that, but the glamour had gone. The contract had finished, people changed jobs, moved on, drifted away. The story ended, not with a bang but with each of us pocketing about a grand and the quiet satisfaction of having accidentally outplayed the market through ignorance and administrative error.
In retrospect, probably the only time incompetence worked entirely in my favour.
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