Free Money

I have been told time and time again that ... "Money doesn't grow on trees." Right... after the past couple of months I am inclined to not believe this adage anymore!

In 1998, I got an email from a friend of mine. It told me... sign up here and you will get free stock shares from a company. So... I signed up. I then got three others to sign up. In total... I received 16 shares. Back in 1998...I was far more trusting of email sign ups.

(Side note -- I don't remember who I got to sign up... so you will have to check out if you were one of those people.)

It was for a new website that was looking to get off the ground by giving away free shares. I have suffered through their weekly emails now for 6 years. One email a week -- completely unobtrusive but annoying nonetheless. I heard about a year ago that they went public so I looked up to see if I still had the shares as for 5 years I just discarded the emails not thinking about the stock. I was amazed to see that I still had the sixteen shares.

That was awesome to me. I was so excited that I had 16 shares of a stock that was hovering at around $4-5 a share. Free money! Then... I forgot about the shares again for about 6 months when I started to monitor the stock again. It was up to $9-10 a share at this point! Even better!!! Double muh free money!

This is where the story gets weird.

The shares... about 4 months ago shot up to over $30 a piece. By that point, I couldn't watch it anymore and I had to get the stock certificate. Before the shares were abstract ideas... now... I had to order the certificate so I could sell those suckers! The stock certificate came and I was now on the map... I had 16 shares of a stock that was now in the mid 30 dollar range. Excellent.

(Apparently, every year there is one stock that just does so much better than it should. This year... it was my stock. The profits to earning ratio was 429.6 at one point. According to my business friends, a ratio of 25 is considered risky. )

I then forgot about the shares again as muh honey and I purchased our new home. When I picked up watching them again... I saw that they had jumped up to $50 a share. Jesus... I began to research ways of selling the stock as I have never had any stock before... I eventually got off my ass and opened up an E-Trade account last week. I sent the stock certificate in and they officially went into my account on Tuesday. I immediately went in to sell them as soon as I could since the share price was around $72 a share all week.

Just as I went in to sell them, the price started to drop dramatically. (As of now... it is around $50 a share.) I still cleared over $1000. I had no risk and all return. I don't wanna be but I may get hooked on this stuff. That was a six-year investment that I didn't know I had....

Free money rocks.

P.S. For those of you wondering -- it was Travelzoo, Inc. (TZOO) on the NASDAQ. I really suggest that you go through the investor relations portion of their website and see if you own any... as it is beginning to plummet in value. but still... that is still money that you didn't have yesterday!