Wall Street

When I was growing up I used to have a fairly sizable collection of baseball cards. At least, to me it was sizable. We were pretty poor, so I never had an allowance...virtually every pack of cards I got was from going out picking up soda cans for the deposit, selling Grit newspapers, and similar "little kid" jobs.
Nevertheless, I acculated what was to me a lot of cards. It may have totalled 1 or 2 thousand, I really don't know, and looking back there is no way of knowing. Memories fade over time, and it is easy to assume there were more or less than there were.
I had a lot of fun with those cards. I would study statistics for hours. I picked which teams I liked or disliked based on pure like/dislike of the team name and uniform. I created a game based on the statistics that was pretty well received among my friends. Kyle, Billy, Woody, Bryce and I played hundreds of games of card-dice baseball. At one point I was actually playing a full season using my rules and an official baseball schedule. There was always a thrill when one of my beloved Dodgers would "hit" a big home run or get a big strike out.
Of course, using the cards, actually looking at them, had an unintended but unavoidable side-effect. The cards would get scratched, there would be no "mint value" for them.
Sometimes we would trade cards. Well, we would TALK about trading. Unfortunately, about that time Beckett came out, and for some of us, the trade was about monetary value. Some of my trading partners would never think of trading their fourth Darrell Strawberry for a mer Razor Shines and Phil Niekro. Why, Strawberry's card was worth 12 dollars, Niekro only 6 and Shines maybe a nickel! I, of course, had zero Darrell Strawberry's....and did not get one for years.
The next month Strawberry's card would mystically be 15 dollars in the next Beckett. Huh? It was the same piece of carboard with the same information on the back. What changed? Well, the date, for one thing. It was a month later.
This never made sense to me. If each card was printed in equal quantities (I do not know if they were or weren't, but at the time we all believed they were), why was one worth sometimes hundreds of dollars while another was a nickel? And why did those values fluctuate from month to month? It still makes no sense to me.
And I have always viewed stocks the same way. We have people at work who check our company stock every day. It has fluctuated by 2 - 3 dollars up and down over the last year. Sometimes it will fluctuate that much over the course of a day or two. Again, I am not an economist, but to me that is just plain silly.
Fortunately, I am not alone in believing this.
"Yet, when he discussed the impact of Coolidge's election...."Wall Street never had such a two weeks," began Will, about the start of Coolidge's run. "People would wire in: 'Buy me some stocks.' The brokers would answer, "What kind?" The buyers would wire back, 'Any kind, the Republicans are in, ain't they supposed to go up?' What makes these things worth so much more on November fifth than they were on November third? You mean to tell me that in a country that was really run on the level, 200 of their National Commodoties could jump their value to millions of dollars in two days? Where is this sudden demand coming from all at once? I am supposed to be a Comedian, but I don't have to use any of my humor to get a laugh out of that."
Will Rogers, quoted in Robinson, Ray, American Original, A life of Will Rogers, Oxford, New York, 1996, p. 157
And don't get me started on the .coms, pay to surf the web, futures markets, or other "money for nothing" schemes.