I’ve only been reviewing these materials my grandpa has given me for ten minutes and I feel so frustrated. I want to stop.
After further examination, my grandpa has given me not only the financial report for Petroleum & Resources Coporation, but for Pfizer as well. He also stuck in a Fidelity Investments Portfolio Stockholder update. Whatever that means.
I decided to start with the latter, since it was small. But after reading the first page and skimming over a few others, I realized I learned only a few things: the people who send this stuff out want their stock to look good, S&P 500 is a popular measure of large cap stocks and the market overall, and that I am extremely bored by this stuff.
I moved on to the P&R Corp book. It was presented more clearly than the Pfizer book. It was printed on thicker and shinier paper, and the overall layout pleased me. In the end though, I decided I was analyzing the layout more than the content itself.
On the inside cover, it gave me a rundown of the stock — price of a share, outstanding shares, objectives of the corporation and even the NYSE symbol. There were graphs and charts, but once I got to the large blocks of text, I stopped.
Here’s my problem. I realize that I will never be interested in the details of the stock market and the corporations that take part in it. As I’ve been learning more about, it makes me think that all this money is made up. The numbers, the percentages, the ratios — it’s all made up to complicate the world. Why can’t we just barter? How can people spend their entire lives chasing stock prices and analyzing the economy?
If you think about it, we don’t even have the need for cash money anymore. All this capital flow is just a transfer of numbers. What if someone erased it all?
I’d hate to ignore these documents and disappoint my grandpa, who seems to love that I’m trying to understand, but at the same time, I’d enjoy throwing these reports in the fire stove (it’s freezing at my house) and forgetting about them forever.
Emilee Lindner 