Counting with Doug: Financing a trip to Lake Tahoe solely with blackjack winnings?

A memorial to Edith Carlson, b. March 19, 1896

The reason that I am formally opening trading on this site on March 19th is not that I have some perverse desire to make things difficult by starting on a quad witching day, but that it is the birthday of my beloved late grandmother, Edith Carlson of Malden, Massachusetts.

She was the one who gave me the trading bug; born in the nineteenth century, she came to America in her twenties and settled just north of Boston. She worked hard every day at not very attractive jobs, but saved her money and was smitten with the stock market. She had a bit of speculator in her, and I hope a bit of it rubbed off.

Many times as a boy I would take the elevated railway trains in to Boston with her on an errand to some broker or bank. It was still the era of ticker tape, and I never forgot the visit to the old brokerage houses where she would jawbone with the brokers while I watched the numbers fly by and tried to learn. I still have one of the old tapes on my desk right now as a keepsake and remindder of those times.

Edith lived to the age of 105, independently until close to her death, and she still tooks trains to the banks in Boston well into her nineties. I loved her and she loved me, so if I have any talent for the market, it is all to her credit.

And that is why I why a fiscal year around here starts on the 19th of March. If Edith is watching I hope she enjoys. And I hope you do too.


4 Comments

[…] For reasons I will get into in a few days, the start date for this venture will be March 19, 2010. I didn’t really plan on starting on the March triple witching day, it just turns out that way. Might make things even more interesting! […]

Posted by The Ground Rules on 19 March 2010 @ 6am

[…] first month of trading: a profit of 21.3%! Since starting this site on March 19th, I can’t complain about the three profitable trades I made, which together produced a first […]

Posted by The first month of trading: a profit of 21.3%! « Cape Cod Doug's on 17 April 2010 @ 6pm

Great post!

Posted by Mark Vice on 13 June 2010 @ 1am

[…] I wrote here in one of my very first posts, the inspiriation for the site was my grandmother, Edith Carlson, who would have been 116 today, […]

Posted by Two years of trading for “Cape Cod Doug,” and a profit of 133% « Cape Cod Doug's Stock and Option Trading Strategies on 19 March 2012 @ 1pm

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