Free Trader Jack -The Story of Jack Miner (The Story of Jack Miner Series) by Neil Behrmann

This would be a signal that it was going to soar to even greater heights. Manson would keep holding the share for as long as it kept rising. He 'allowed his profits to run'. On the other hand if the share fell to a lower level, he would sell quickly.
    I read and re-read the book that was less than 200 pages long. Went to bed at about 2am in the morning and fell into a deep sleep, dreaming about fish in a mammoth aquarium.
    The dogs woke me early in the morning, but I was so excited that I wasn't tired. Martha was still sleeping so I took them out for a short walk and then came back again and paged through The Crowd. I knew that dictators like Hitler could influence crowds and encourage them to do terrible things. But as Martha said, the crowd also pushed the stock market up and down. Anything could influence the broking and investor crowd. A cure for cancer, an oil discovery, bank crashes or war. If the crowd of investors noticed that certain shares were going up, they would follow and buy. During a panic the crowd would dump shares. The book helped me understand that if I played the stock market, I had to move fast. I had to buy and sell before the crowd. Manson warned that mistakes would be made, but I would be OK if I sold my shares quickly and cut losses before they became worse. The first loss was the smallest loss, he wrote.
    I was ready to act, but how?
    'The market opens tomorrow and I want to catch some fish,' I told Martha.
    'It's a waste of time fishing in Hampstead ponds. Hardly any fish. There's a good fishmonger in Kentish Town,' she said.
    'No, I mean shares . . . I want to study the stock market. See which shares to buy.'
    'Try Swiss Cottage Library,' grinned Martha. 'It's about two miles from here.'
     
    *   *   *
     
    There were several computers inside Swiss Cottage library. I browsed the Internet to find out what was happening on the London Stock Exchange. Some sites displayed shares on charts. Most shares had peaked recently and were now falling.
    I had a pencil and paper and drew an aquarium with units from bottom to top. I didn't bother with the numerous shares that were slipping towards the bottom of the tank. But the charts showed that gold shares were behaving differently. I followed Manson's instructions and examined the charts of gold share prices over a period of three to five years. During most of this time they had done virtually nothing. The gold fish had swum calmly up and down at the bottom of the tank. They were virtually asleep. But suddenly in the past week, gold shares had risen. This was a sign that something was happening. I found that there were lots of gold mines in the United States, Canada, South Africa and Australia. Sure enough, their shares were beginning to rise. A friendly little girl came up to me with her mother and gave me some crayons. She watched me take an orange crayon and draw a gold fish pushing though the membrane. She took the crayon and drew a few more rising from the bottom to the top of the lowest compartment. Some went halfway through the membrane. I looked at the drawing with a child's imagination. My drawing became the aquarium in the pet shop. Gold fish were desperate for food. They were bumping their heads against the membrane of their compartment. I thought about it. The food of the gold mines was gold. If the gold price rose, profits of gold mines would increase and their shares would rise. I searched for a chart on the gold price. The price was hardly moving. That puzzled me until I discovered from the charts that gold shares tended to rise before the gold price began to increase. They also rose much faster and much more than gold. I knew that there must have been some sort of explanation, but I didn't care. From what I saw, if the gold price rose by say ten per cent, gold shares would soar by thirty per cent. If gold bullion jumped by a third, the price of gold shares would double. If gold fell, the shares would come down with a bigger bump. Huge