The Daily Routine
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I said that Grandpa filled his days by fishing and raising vegetables in his garden. But that wasn’t his only daily routine. Each morning he received the Wall Street Journal on his doorstep. He would go through the back pages where the daily closing prices for the stocks were listed and he would record them, one at a time in his ledger. Then he would use one of those calculators that print to add up the value of his portfolio. On most days it was my Grandma operating the calculator. They did this each morning either before or after eating breakfast.
Then, each afternoon when Grandpa returned from working in his garden, he would immediately turn on CNN, which was the major source of financial news at the time. I would watch CNN with him for a while, then wait patiently for him to fall asleep so I could put on some Nickelodeon cartoons.
But while I was waiting I would gaze at the stock ticker along the bottom of the screen. It was a little row of numbers displayed beneath the talking heads in suits. I couldn’t understand anything they were saying But those scrolling numbers have always had a way of capturing my attention. You could remember the ticker for one particular stock and watch for it to come around again and again. Each time it would change and you would see a little arrow pointing in the direction of the change. Up or down. I had no idea what it was all about.
After observing Grandpa’s routine over many years, I began to want to know why monitoring the stock market was so important to him. I could understand gardening, although the truth was that I found it boring, tedious and exhausting. But the result was food, which was obviously valuable. Fishing I could definitely understand. Fishing also produced food but in a way which I found neither boring nor tedious. It was still exhausting though. (And I really didn’t like cleaning fish). But where was the value in calculating and monitoring the prices of stocks?
Why was it so important to him?
