The Book of Ashes

The stockmarket fall... 8:22AM

Today it rains. A steady pitter patter of tiny feel, tapping out a story... stay in bed.

So the Aussie sharemarket game is interesting. The sharemarket on average has been going up and up and I couldn't believe the average scores. From a start of $50,000, I was now on $54,000 after 11 weeks, something like 40-50% increase if I continued like that for a year. Thats not the stupid thing. The average (of 16,000 people) was something like $55,000 (I was below average) and the top person was on $80,000. It seemed like the share market was a magical place of instant gain, no matter how crap you were. However things are not always as they seem and the sharemarket is a land of ups and downs, what goes up, must come down (or vice versa). So it seems everyone was investing heavily in metals, ores and commodities. Australia has many of these industries and they were very popular and making large gains on the sharemarket as well as the sharemarket going up on average anyway. Then the cancer man called in a favour, a rumour went around that these metals and industries were overpriced. Everyone started selling and the average shareprice fell. My shares in NewCrest Mining went from $24.something to $21 in a couple of days. I didn't fare as badly as others tho. My Telecom shares are propably doing alright, I bought at the bottom of the dip, they can only go up right? So an interesting lesson. I'm still on $52,000 something, the average is slightly below me now (I'm ranked 4000th (ish) out of 16,000, won't last for long tho). If only I'd sold those Newcrest mining shares a while back, I thought about it, best to trust your INSTINCTS. To work....