Table of Contents
PART ONE: THE STORY
1. Moneymaking as a student
‘Private import’
Escape to hard currencies
Polish markets and German tourists
The East German mark
My first steps on the stock market
‘Shopping tourism’ in Austria
The Czechoslovakian crown
2. The compensation note
The idea
The Mafia
Note speculation
Back to the stock market
The OTC market
3. The way to sophisticated markets
The Tequila effect (Mexican crisis)
At the Commodity and Currency Exchange
My first futures
Riding the bull
The Asian Contagion
El Nino and Croesus
4. The Russian Crisis
The new capitalist miracle
The crash
Worldwide turmoil
Greenspan saves the world
Thanksgiving and the Web
Bulgarian adventure
5. The bubble
Brazil crisis
Dow 10,000!
Y2K-bug
Fait accompli
Final tech bubble
Disaster
6. 2001 – A Bear Odyssey
My Finnish ‘darling’
The Easter rally
Mathematics of the market: 2x2 = 5-1
Profit warning
The falling knives
9/11
The turning point
Marconi (Trade of the year)
The ‘Taliban rally’
7. Bottom fishing
Put options experiment
Bull trap
Under the ‘Osama lows’
Bargain hunting
The final US bottom
Bumpy ride
European capitulation
The Saddam turmoil
8. Bull market again
The final European bottom
Fighting the trend
The bull is real!
Google
The emerging miracle
Forint and bonds
Compensation notes again
Oil vs. dollar
Where the sun never sets
PART TWO: STORIES OF OTHER INVESTORS FROM
THE TIME OF TRANSITION
1. The Bond Trader
2. The Journalist
3. The Privatizer
4. The ‘Greedy’
5. The Disciplined Trader
6. The Gambler Genius
PART THREE: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO THE STOCK
MARKET
1. Why do we need the stock exchange and how it works
2. Valuation of stocks
3. Other factors that influence the stock prices
4. Trading techniques and instruments
Market cycles: when to buy?
When to sell: stop-loss and profit lock-in
5. Technical analysis
PART FOUR: STOCKS MARKETS, INDECES, SHARES
1. US Markets in general
A brief history of US markets
Indices and the manipulating of the Dow
2. New York Stock Exchange
3. NASDAQ
Bellwethers
Internet stocks
Semiconductor stocks
Others
4. London Stock Exchange
5. Deutsche Börse (German market)
6. Other European shares in Amsterdam, Zurich, Paris and Helsinki
7. Emerging Europe
8. Russian shares
Abbreviations
Glossary
Index
Excerpt
When someone asks me what I do as a profession, my answer is: I work with
money, mainly at the stock market. Their next question is often how I started it.
The answer isn’t so simple; I usually start telling a long story. The person who
took the question is listening to me as if I told an adventurous novel. And yes, it
sounds like it! When I told it over and over again, I thought I should write it in a
book, like a real novel. Maybe it is really as interesting!
At the same time, lots of people have told me they’d like to learn some basics
about the stock market. Many of these people had tried buying stocks once or
twice in recent years, usually trading on tips, or had simply been drawn to the
market by the ever-rising prices in the late 1990s, only to realize that they knew
nothing about the market. Now I’ve decided to publish this story of my
adventures in the world of money, along with a basic overview of the stock
market based on my own experience.
The first part tells the story of my adventures in the years of the transition from
communism to the market economy in Eastern Europe, beginning in Hungary
in the 1980s on street currency markets and continuing with my adventures
with the East German mark, the Austrian schilling and other currencies. I then
describe how I traded a variety of special equities and later went on to trade on
the emerging stock markets in interesting times such as the Asian Contagion
in 1997 and the Russian crisis in 1998. Finally I talk about how I began trading
on the biggest world markets like the NYSE, the Nasdaq, and European
markets, and my years of experience on these.
In the second part of the book, I recount the stories of some other traders
whose careers took a more or less similar path to mine but each with its own
unique and interesting aspect.
In the third part I explain the basics of the stock market in straight-forward
terms and in the final part I also mention the most important markets and
stocks which I traded.
During my career, I have relied on the experience of two famous stock market
experts. One of them is Andre Kostolany, the speculator who operated on
different markets for more than seven decades, and the other is Jesse
Livermore, the trader king of the early 20th century. I quote from both of them
several times.
I would recommend this book to anybody who is interested in adventurous
stories about money, and anybody who has ever bought a stock or is planning
to give it a try.
