What goes up...

I can remember, when I were a lad, helping my Dad navigate endless pages of Teletext share prices at the end of the day, trying to understand what the endless rows of capitalized digits and letters actually meant. My Dad had, and still does have I believe, a canny knack (a jazz musician from the 40s, Canny Knack), of being able to spot a company whose shares were about to soar, but then he would always forget to buy them and watch forlornly as they rose in value, daily, on that digitized Teletext display page, leaving him and his fistful of pounds behind. Ah well...

I am now endevouring to follow in his footsteps (somewhat) but entering the world of stocks and shares. Buy low, sell high, greed is good, money money money, all that. Might as well yes? It's been two days. I have lost money. I am excited, it is quite fun. I suddenly feel immense loyalty to the two companies I have invested in. I hope they do more 'good' business to help their shares go 'up', rather than performing 'badly' and therefore going 'down'. Apologies if the financial language there confused you.

Teletext was a funny old service, it would always revolve around to the page you wanted after endless refreshes 8/13, 9/13, 10/13 until you were about to reach the one you wanted, before it would randomly jump to 12/13 leading to huge levels of exasperation as you had to wait for it to work its way around again. I used to leave Teletext on when big football matches were taking place, just to hope the little pixilated name would flash up Giggs, 34, or Kanchelskis, 74. A different world that.