The World's Biggest Casino.
With the exception of buying lottery tickets and the odd sports wager with a friend, I would hardly be considered a gambler by any stretch of the imagination. While growing up my mother mentioned many times how gambling was a sin and how it had destroyed many lives and shattered many families.
Back while I was married to Bonnie I went to Las Vegas once while visiting her mother in Los Angeles. The three of us headed over for a little junket sponsored by the Sands Hotel and Casino. Every single day the Sands Casino would offer free flights from the Burbank Airport so long as you agreed to spend a minimum of $200 at the casino. It was a day long excursion with free food, free drinks and your first $5 chip courtesy of the house.
There were three things about that trip I will never forget.
The first one was when we landed and seeing a massive shiny metallic green jumbo jet sitting on the tarmac. It belonged to a Saudi Sheik who flew into Vegas regularly and spent millions each visit gambling on the strip.
The second was the pilot welcoming all of us on the plane.
“Welcome to Lost Wages,” he said with a chuckle.
My third memory was also at the Vegas airport after we had landed. I needed to take a piss and right beside the urinal was a slot machine also known as the one arm bandit.
On my first pull ever, I lost.
We spent a full day at the clockless, windowless casino and I lost all my money within the first hour. Bonnie on the other hand was up $3000 playing slots and blackjack. She was one of the few on the packed DC-9 who was returning back to LA that night with more money than when she had arrived.
She had an extra $700 cash in her wallet.
After that trip it would be decades later before I would physically walk into a casino again. In the meantime I would venture into the world’s biggest casino. A casino you could play right from the comfort of your own home. A casino that had made millions of people filthy rich and had also driven millions of others into bankruptcy.
The world’s biggest casino is the stock market.
My first foray into the stock market was back in the late ’80s.The wife of a teammate that I played hockey with worked at one of the big brokerage houses in Toronto. There was a new gold mining company starting up in northern Ontario and it was about to go public. Bonnie and I could get in on the ground floor level and purchase stock in the company before it would go on sale to the public. We were told we had to act fast if we wanted to capitalize on the stock that was sure to double almost overnight. We were getting a deal on commissions also, paying a ten in ten out rate. In other words, our fee would only be ten bucks to buy and ten bucks when we sold.
If I recall the stock was a buck and I wrote a cheque for $1010. Bonnie and I had just purchased one thousand shares of Novo Beaucage stock with the anticipation of quickly doubling our investment.
It never happened.
I don’t even remember how much we were paid out when we eventually sold months later. It was nowhere close to the g-note that we had originally invested. After that first experience buying stocks then followed by the mid-90’s Bre-X scandal, investing in the stock market had left a very sour taste in my mouth. I was gun shy about ever returning to the stock market again.
However, while I was working in the ice cream business, one of the girls in the office was married to an investment broker. I had some extra money floating around; I thought I would have him invest my surplus into safe moneymaking blue chip companies. That crook had me in and out of stocks almost weekly. My monthly statements always reflecting that I was making no money, yet I was paying huge commissions to him.
Back while I was married to Bonnie I went to Las Vegas once while visiting her mother in Los Angeles. The three of us headed over for a little junket sponsored by the Sands Hotel and Casino. Every single day the Sands Casino would offer free flights from the Burbank Airport so long as you agreed to spend a minimum of $200 at the casino. It was a day long excursion with free food, free drinks and your first $5 chip courtesy of the house.
There were three things about that trip I will never forget.
The first one was when we landed and seeing a massive shiny metallic green jumbo jet sitting on the tarmac. It belonged to a Saudi Sheik who flew into Vegas regularly and spent millions each visit gambling on the strip.
The second was the pilot welcoming all of us on the plane.
“Welcome to Lost Wages,” he said with a chuckle.
My third memory was also at the Vegas airport after we had landed. I needed to take a piss and right beside the urinal was a slot machine also known as the one arm bandit.
On my first pull ever, I lost.
We spent a full day at the clockless, windowless casino and I lost all my money within the first hour. Bonnie on the other hand was up $3000 playing slots and blackjack. She was one of the few on the packed DC-9 who was returning back to LA that night with more money than when she had arrived.
She had an extra $700 cash in her wallet.
After that trip it would be decades later before I would physically walk into a casino again. In the meantime I would venture into the world’s biggest casino. A casino you could play right from the comfort of your own home. A casino that had made millions of people filthy rich and had also driven millions of others into bankruptcy.
The world’s biggest casino is the stock market.
My first foray into the stock market was back in the late ’80s.The wife of a teammate that I played hockey with worked at one of the big brokerage houses in Toronto. There was a new gold mining company starting up in northern Ontario and it was about to go public. Bonnie and I could get in on the ground floor level and purchase stock in the company before it would go on sale to the public. We were told we had to act fast if we wanted to capitalize on the stock that was sure to double almost overnight. We were getting a deal on commissions also, paying a ten in ten out rate. In other words, our fee would only be ten bucks to buy and ten bucks when we sold.
If I recall the stock was a buck and I wrote a cheque for $1010. Bonnie and I had just purchased one thousand shares of Novo Beaucage stock with the anticipation of quickly doubling our investment.
It never happened.
I don’t even remember how much we were paid out when we eventually sold months later. It was nowhere close to the g-note that we had originally invested. After that first experience buying stocks then followed by the mid-90’s Bre-X scandal, investing in the stock market had left a very sour taste in my mouth. I was gun shy about ever returning to the stock market again.
However, while I was working in the ice cream business, one of the girls in the office was married to an investment broker. I had some extra money floating around; I thought I would have him invest my surplus into safe moneymaking blue chip companies. That crook had me in and out of stocks almost weekly. My monthly statements always reflecting that I was making no money, yet I was paying huge commissions to him.
He was lining his pockets at my expense.
It is no wonder they call them brokers, I was going fuck'n broke letting him handle my money. Chalk up another investing disaster for me. You would’ve thought that I had learned my lesson and been happy just to keep my money under my mattress.
No way.
You need to have money to make money, I was always told. I knew I would not make my fortune just keeping my money sitting in the bank investing in low interest GIC’s. If I wanted to make a lot of money I needed to take some risks. The theory is quite simple, the higher the risk then the higher the potential reward. Fast forward to the late 90's, the internet was sweeping the world and investors were making fortunes investing in all the new dot-com companies. No longer would investors need to buy stocks going through a broker because banks were now offering DIY discount brokerages. I would no longer be getting any investment advice from brokers.
Yeah, like I was going to miss that.
I could now do my own research on a company's website and base my investment decision on what I had learned. Commissions were also much lower and I could now buy or sell stock in any public company. I would just pay a flat rate per every thousand shares I purchased or sold, instead of a percentage of my total investment which the brokers charged.
Still I was gun shy. I was not ready to pull the trigger and enter back into the world’s biggest casino.
During this time I was playing hockey every Friday afternoon with a bunch of teachers and some of their students. The hockey was good and I hardly ever missed the weekly skate, but it was not just the hockey that kept me showing up. For once in my life I kept my mouth shut and I listened to the dressing room banter. Some of the teachers were investing a lot of money in dot-com companies. As they talked amongst themselves, it was the company symbols I was focused on remembering. When I got home, I would research those same company symbols that I had heard them talking about in the dressing room. I still remember when I finally pulled the trigger on my first purchase. It was a couple thousand shares of a company called Multiactive Software. The trading symbol was E on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE).
It is no wonder they call them brokers, I was going fuck'n broke letting him handle my money. Chalk up another investing disaster for me. You would’ve thought that I had learned my lesson and been happy just to keep my money under my mattress.
No way.
You need to have money to make money, I was always told. I knew I would not make my fortune just keeping my money sitting in the bank investing in low interest GIC’s. If I wanted to make a lot of money I needed to take some risks. The theory is quite simple, the higher the risk then the higher the potential reward. Fast forward to the late 90's, the internet was sweeping the world and investors were making fortunes investing in all the new dot-com companies. No longer would investors need to buy stocks going through a broker because banks were now offering DIY discount brokerages. I would no longer be getting any investment advice from brokers.
Yeah, like I was going to miss that.
I could now do my own research on a company's website and base my investment decision on what I had learned. Commissions were also much lower and I could now buy or sell stock in any public company. I would just pay a flat rate per every thousand shares I purchased or sold, instead of a percentage of my total investment which the brokers charged.
Still I was gun shy. I was not ready to pull the trigger and enter back into the world’s biggest casino.
During this time I was playing hockey every Friday afternoon with a bunch of teachers and some of their students. The hockey was good and I hardly ever missed the weekly skate, but it was not just the hockey that kept me showing up. For once in my life I kept my mouth shut and I listened to the dressing room banter. Some of the teachers were investing a lot of money in dot-com companies. As they talked amongst themselves, it was the company symbols I was focused on remembering. When I got home, I would research those same company symbols that I had heard them talking about in the dressing room. I still remember when I finally pulled the trigger on my first purchase. It was a couple thousand shares of a company called Multiactive Software. The trading symbol was E on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE).
I had now officially entered back into the world's biggest casino.
The stock soared rather quickly and within a few weeks I was up a lot of money. I sold and made a handsome profit. So where would my next investment be? I wondered. Afterall, I needed a place to park those profits.
Nortel Networks was a Canadian behemoth of a company and was an innovator during the tech bubble. Nortel created innovations that was making the exploding internet much better and much faster. Nortel spent billions of dollars developing the infrastructure that would go into the devices the world would take for granted just a decade later. At its peak during the tech bubble of 2000, Nortel Networks had $30US billions of annual revenue and 93,000 employees worldwide. It reached a market cap of $250US billion and was at one time the eighth largest company in the world.
It would be Nortel Networks that I decided I would begin to diligently invest in.
Besides, the stock price just kept rising weekly on the TSE as well as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Every company or government pension as well as most mutual funds all owned Nortel stock within their portfolios. If you had money invested in Canada back in 2000, you would surely have owned Nortel shares either directly or indirectly.
I jumped in feet first; it was a no brainer.
As the Friday hockey began to wind down in the spring of 2000, I was still invested in a few smaller dot-com companies. I sold out of those stocks and also made a nice profit. The following hockey season was sure to provide me with many more stock tips, but I needed to park my money over the summer. I needed to park my money into something safe and secure so I parked all my money into Nortel Networks stock.
The world’s biggest casino was starting to make me a lot of money rather quickly. There were weeks when Nortel Networks would rise by ten bucks or more and I just kept adding more Nortel Stock into my account.
During this time, Bonnie was aware I was buying stocks. For the most part she thought investing in the stock market was a waste of money. Her thinking was solely based on our previous investment in that mining company and my experiences dabbling with other brokers. Bonnie had no idea just how much money I was accumulating for OUR future. I looked so forward to the day when I could show her that WE had a half million bucks put away for our retirement.
The stock soared rather quickly and within a few weeks I was up a lot of money. I sold and made a handsome profit. So where would my next investment be? I wondered. Afterall, I needed a place to park those profits.
Nortel Networks was a Canadian behemoth of a company and was an innovator during the tech bubble. Nortel created innovations that was making the exploding internet much better and much faster. Nortel spent billions of dollars developing the infrastructure that would go into the devices the world would take for granted just a decade later. At its peak during the tech bubble of 2000, Nortel Networks had $30US billions of annual revenue and 93,000 employees worldwide. It reached a market cap of $250US billion and was at one time the eighth largest company in the world.
It would be Nortel Networks that I decided I would begin to diligently invest in.
Besides, the stock price just kept rising weekly on the TSE as well as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Every company or government pension as well as most mutual funds all owned Nortel stock within their portfolios. If you had money invested in Canada back in 2000, you would surely have owned Nortel shares either directly or indirectly.
I jumped in feet first; it was a no brainer.
As the Friday hockey began to wind down in the spring of 2000, I was still invested in a few smaller dot-com companies. I sold out of those stocks and also made a nice profit. The following hockey season was sure to provide me with many more stock tips, but I needed to park my money over the summer. I needed to park my money into something safe and secure so I parked all my money into Nortel Networks stock.
The world’s biggest casino was starting to make me a lot of money rather quickly. There were weeks when Nortel Networks would rise by ten bucks or more and I just kept adding more Nortel Stock into my account.
During this time, Bonnie was aware I was buying stocks. For the most part she thought investing in the stock market was a waste of money. Her thinking was solely based on our previous investment in that mining company and my experiences dabbling with other brokers. Bonnie had no idea just how much money I was accumulating for OUR future. I looked so forward to the day when I could show her that WE had a half million bucks put away for our retirement.
At the time that was my ultimate goal, $500k in my DIY brokerage account.
Bonnie was absolutely terrible with money spending every cent she earned and then some. There was not a shadow of doubt in my mind that if the three of us were to have any future financial security whatsoever, it would be up to me to make it happen. It was on Saturday July 29th, 2000 when Bonnie, Stephanie and myself were staying at the Hidden Valley Resort up in Huntsville. We were there to celebrate her grandmother's 80th birthday. It was a big to do and her family from all over would be attending.
I grabbed one of the complimentary Toronto Star newspapers in the lobby and I went right to the financial section. Back then the weeks closing stock prices were listed in the Saturday newspaper and the most active stock traded on the TSE that week was as usual Nortel Networks. During that week on July 26th Nortel hit $124.50 per share. I owned 4000 shares and I was now just a measly $2k short of my ultimate goal. There was no doubt in my mind; I would now be reaching my ultimate goal much sooner than I could ever have anticipated.
We have all heard the saying about not counting your chickens before they hatch.
We have all heard the saying about not putting all your eggs in one basket.
I was about to learn the hard way just how those two sayings would haunt me for the rest of my life. The world’s biggest casino was about to teach me a lesson and it would be a lesson that I would never forget.
I grabbed one of the complimentary Toronto Star newspapers in the lobby and I went right to the financial section. Back then the weeks closing stock prices were listed in the Saturday newspaper and the most active stock traded on the TSE that week was as usual Nortel Networks. During that week on July 26th Nortel hit $124.50 per share. I owned 4000 shares and I was now just a measly $2k short of my ultimate goal. There was no doubt in my mind; I would now be reaching my ultimate goal much sooner than I could ever have anticipated.
We have all heard the saying about not counting your chickens before they hatch.
We have all heard the saying about not putting all your eggs in one basket.
I was about to learn the hard way just how those two sayings would haunt me for the rest of my life. The world’s biggest casino was about to teach me a lesson and it would be a lesson that I would never forget.
