Leaving a floater on the market

I’ve been fortunate enough to have experienced some interesting things over the years. From racing cars to jumping out of an aeroplane, scuba-diving through a ship-wreck somewhere under the Atlantic, swimming with wild dolphins in the Pacific, walking across a glacier and driving a tank loaded with paintballs. I’ve also projectile vomited through a snorkel.

In fact I had mentally compiled a sort of bucket list; things I’d like to do before I die. Because I’ve now ticked most of them off, I recently started compiling a list of things I definitely don’t want to do before I die. The most recent entries include being in the same room as Nicki Minaj, accepting another invitation to go to a football match, go to a nightclub and watch another film with Russell Crowe in it. However, I was coerced into doing something off my “not to do” list a few years ago and that was go to a boot fair.

I always scoffed at boot fairs. This is mainly because I always associated them with pikeys and people who couldn’t afford new stuff. However, when I first started dating my wife, I had to change my opinion of them because she loves boot fairs. She likes to find a bargain and is a collector of many weird and wonderful things. In fact we have a collection of so much crap now that I can’t actually remember what the floor looks like in the bedroom. Ironically, it’s got to the stage where we need to go to a boot fair to sell all the crap.

Anyway, having been dragged to literally hundreds of the damn things in and around the local area, I have picked up one or two bargains myself. It is amazing the amount of crap people have and it’s even more amazing how much crap people are willing to buy.

Given that most things sold at boot fairs are in pence rather than pounds, I can’t believe the audacity of some people. I remember walking past a stall once and listening to a guy bartering with a seller over something that was worth several tens of pounds if bought new in a shop but was being sold second hand for 50p. This guy was asking if the seller would accept 20p for it. They then proceeded to haggle over it. Seriously, how depressing is your life when you have to haggle over 30p?

Of course people do make a lot of money selling stuff at boot fairs. Some people even make a living out of it. Admittedly it probably isn’t a very good living and they most likely have to do all their shopping at LIDL and Oxfam but quite often sellers will go round the boot fairs themselves and buy a piece of crap from someone else for 50p and sell it on their own stand for a pound. It’s the same with Ebay; people buy and sell a colossal amount of rubbish on that site and make a living out of it.

Of course then there is the other scale of the business world where people buy and sell stocks and shares and deal in millions of pounds. I’ve never quite got my head around how this works exactly. From what I’ve seen, people stare at numbers on TV screens all day and then shout “buy” and “sell” into their mobile phones and then have a stroke before they are 30.

I have stocks and shares in various things and all I know is I have invested in medium risk and low risk businesses and that I used to put money in every month and get lots more back. Apparently I now lose money because it is being stolen by the Greeks or something like that.

Of course Facebook recently took the decision to float itself on the stock market. Given it is one of the biggest and most well known brands on the planet now, you would think this was an obvious move. Well, given that it is one of the biggest and most well know brands in the world, I’d argue that it is massively over-valued and over-hyped.

So how has it got on since its flotation? Well, not very well seems to be the answer. As an over-valued and over-hyped brand, people paid over the odds for shares and the value has plummeted because there is no real value behind it. Of course coming from a guy who has already admitted to knowing nothing about the stock market, I can’t really comment. In fact, when I first read about its IPO, I just assumed it was another Facebook chat acronym like LOL and ROFL and, quite frankly, if anyone asked me about floating stock I’d hand them a coat hanger and tell them to break it up and try flushing the lavatory again.

It surprises me that anyone was daft enough to buy shares in Facebook. I mean, sure, it’s a big name and has hundreds of millions of members, a no doubt huge revenue stream through advertising and a world-wide reach across the internet rivalled only by Google, Youtube and porn, but after the massive dot com boom in the early noughties when companies were floated for obscene amounts and then went bankrupt, I would have thought people would have learned that lesson. Apparently not. I mean how does one value a company like Facebook? Is it based on the number of users? Is it based on the amount it earns in revenue? Is it based on how many personal details it shares with the FBI? How do you quantify such a thing?

Twitter has been valued at an obscene amount as well. How does Twitter even make any money? It doesn’t offer advertising of any sort as far as I can tell and it has no obvious revenue stream. It has no real value other than to allow people to stalk their favourite celebrities and update their fake friends on the colour of their turds. Perhaps I’m naive but if a Twit offered to sell me a share of Twitter for more than 1p I’d tell them to chirp off and offer me something cheap.