Reminiscences of a stock operator

Dude: Turn yourself right back around and buy some more wrinkled shirts.

Alice Corona Ireland Brownlow, my father’s mother’s mother, died in 1999 at the age of 97. In her will, Alice graciously left each of her 18 great-grandchildren £1,500. I was a teenager at the time, and on the advice of my father, I chose to invest my share and thus take my first stab at the stock market.

Ha! The stock market completely perplexed me. Teenage me simply envisioned it as gambling; If I was lucky, my money would magically replicate into more money. If not, my money would just as magically disappear. So when it came time to select a stock, my dad suggested I invest in a company I recognized, a business that mattered to me. So I did not pick Apple. Or IBM. I picked the GAP. As in the casual clothing retailer that sells wrinkled button-down shirts.

On April 4, 1999, I purchased 15 shares of GPS for $49.375 a share. In October of that same year, I expanded my portfolio by adding 10 shares at $31.5625. My dad served as custodian for my E-Trade account, and all statements arrived addressed to us both. It was the first “adult” mail I ever received, and I relished discovering the green and purple-accented envelopes in our mailbox. For a while, I even opened them.

Reginald & Alice Brownlow, my great-grandparents

When the novelty of high finance finally wore off, I began squirreling away the statements; They were too important to throw out but not interesting enough to actually read. I stuffed them into desk drawers, buried them in filing cabinets and stacked them in my closet. And yet the envelopes kept coming. It took my family and I five relocations – to different cities and states – before we managed to foil the U.S. Postal Service’s mail forwarding system and shake E-Trade and the ubiquitous envelopes from my trail.

Fast-forward 15 years: I’m a (reasonably) responsible adult. What’s this in the attic? A 2004 E-Trade statement? Oh yeah – I’m an investor! In the GAP. Could that be worth anything? I’ll telephone E-Trade and find out.

“What’s the account number, ma’am?” 

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have the account password?”

“Um, no.”

“How about the email address associated with the account?”

“Funny you should ask that because I think this account was opened before email was invented. Ha. Ha. Um, hello?”

A few more awkward phone calls and some document submissions later and I finally have access to my E-Trade account, my very own adult, non-custodial account. It’s time to properly manage my estate, maybe make some trades and bark some calls to maximize my equity. So yesterday, for the first time ever, I logged into the E-Trade website. And laughed.

I am proud to report, after 15 years of painstaking investment and eagle-eyed monitoring of the market through its tumultuous ups and downs, my net profit is…$26.

Naturally, this sudden windfall has me wondering: Will $26 be enough to buy me one of those wrinkled, button-down shirts?