The Relationship Stock Market

I think when you talk about "kids in the ghetto" and what’s missing from an inner-city education, though I didn't learn much about this in my hoity-toity schools either, is knowledge about the financial markets. They don’t teach money or business to young kids. I don’t understand that. In a capitalist society how can you not be showing flash cards of P/E ratios to your children at five years old? It’s not to say build your world around money. But it is the most powerful man made force on the planet. We should know it like the palms of our hands (which I personally know better than the back).

And I don’t think it’s about young folks not being able to handle the information. I think it began with just a simple selfish withholding of knowledge. "This info is privileged." And now that it’s not necessarily [as] privileged, it’s more muscle reflex. Our curriculums have not evolved.

If you ever reclaim the space in your brain, and file for your rebate on useless education, make sure you don't get rid of the money info.

Anyways, I’ve had some recent dialogue with friends about their relationships, and started thinking that perhaps we all buy, sell, and trade on the relationship stock market. If we look at some of our dealings from that perspective, particularly in the romantic sense, there's a lot that makes sense.

The people around you are stocks. Everyone. Male, female, and other. They are forces you can monitor, you can profile and evaluate, you can draw opinions about, you can speculate on, but you can't control. And their value to you may go high, or it may go low. But the bottom line of it all is that:

Past history is no guarantee of future results.

No slick-talking, shucking-and-jiving, TAN stock trader is going to be able to guarantee what TAN is going to do. What value it’s going to hold for you in a month, 6 months, a year, ten tears. They can project, and they can back that up with a world of data, "Look at this chart, says here, 'TAN is the future' - we can't go wrong with TAN. TAN's smart, funny, and wears a mask. His growth potential is HUGE." And they can be right 10, 20, even 30 percent of the time *say ooooohhhh*- it will mean nothing if I rob you the next day for all your jewelry.

Of course, in this world, the only real broker is you. You make all the transactions, you manage your own private fund of relationships. Perhaps you've been investing in short people and negroes for the past five years, and you're seeing no results. Just remember, you don't want to get to caught up in the moment. Have good reasons to sell. Past history is no guarantee of future results. When a movie about short black people comes out, don't be the person calling up all those old friends of yours whom you ditched because other people kept asking, "why do you keep buying in on short people and negroes? Those stock attributes haven't been a growth indicator since the days of Different Strokes and Webster." So you sell, and now you're pissed because you knew the guy from Bad Santa was going to make short negroes hot again.

Now, what was I talking about? Oh, why people and relationships are just money, errr stocks.

So, just like the financial stock market, the thing to do if you just want a good safe investment of your money/heart/time, is to get a little fund of blue chip stocks. Then buy and hold. And the biggest ingredient in terms of evaluating whether a stock is a blue chipper or not? Time.

You need time to find out if this in fact is one of the best companies on the market. Cause with blue chip stocks, you don’t care about the state of the market. Whether they did something particularly good or bad today. You only care about the company. Is it fundamentally strong? Will it grow? Is it stable? What’s the environment around it like? When you get a relationship that clicks on a lot of cylinders, you say ok, I like what’s going on here. I’m going to invest. And you just invest more and more over time. Eventually, your position might be such that you're almost like partners.

This all presumes there are no unforeseen dramatic circumstances. Like someone starts lying and telling secrets, and/or posting your insider information on their blog. Or they start shredding their clothes. Or, like, everyone in the world starts hating them and all of a sudden you look and think Kevin has turned into a bad person. There’s been some sort of shift in the company, with management, and the outlook on Kevin is not looking so bright anymore.

Because ultimately the value of a stock is only really known when you cash out. When the person dies. Or you break up/split. To know the true value of a stock, you have to get rid of lose it. Your blue chip friend of twenty years, you refer to as Disney, might decide suddenly he's into child bestiality. That stock, for most people, is likely going to nosedive. But these things happen, you never know.

Beside the blue chips, you also have penny stocks. For ladies, this is the equivalent of the bum-ass trife mofo you met out late at the club. Actually, not even the club, you met him in the McDonald's after, and you thought he went to the club, but really he was in the McDonald's all night waiting for girls to come out the club and think he was in the club. Most of those penny stocks represent penny companies. But some have potential. I often think TAN is a penny stock. Especially when I'm out on a Saturday night, in McDonald's, waiting for girls to come out the club.

Ok, where was I ...?

I'm going to have to pick this up another time...

The relationship stock market ladies and gentleman. Buy and sell wisely, carefully. Stocks have feelings too.