Why look at markets at all?

Money sitting still

The same hundred dollars, twice. The year the truck opened it bought forty tacos; five years later it buys thirty, and the ten dashed ones are what sitting still cost.

Money kept in a drawer keeps its number. A hundred dollars stays a hundred dollars. What changes is what it can buy, because most things slowly cost more as the years go by: food, rent, fuel, a haircut.

In a usual year the change is small, a few cents on the dollar. Over ten or twenty years those cents add up, and the same hundred dollars buys noticeably less than it did. Nobody took anything from you; the money stood still while everything around it moved.

So people look for places where money might grow instead of standing still. A bank pays a little for holding it. Lending it to a government or a company pays a little more. Owning a piece of a business can pay more again, or lose, because a business can do well or badly.

Markets are where those pieces change hands, all day, between people who have never met. This book does not say whether anyone should use them. It teaches the letters, so that when you look, you can read what you are looking at.

Said with a food truck

The year your friend opened her food truck, a taco cost two dollars and fifty cents. You had a hundred dollars in a jar on the shelf, and the jar was worth forty tacos.

Five years later the taco costs three twenty-five. Your friend is not greedy: her tortillas, her gas and the lot she parks on all cost more. The jar still says a hundred dollars, but it is worth thirty tacos now, with change. Ten tacos went missing without anyone touching the jar.

That is the whole reason this book exists. Somewhere there may be a better home for the jar than the shelf, and the homes that might grow it faster are the same ones that can also shrink it.

That is step zero. The next chapter looks at the home people most often find for the jar: a slice of a business.

Nothing here is advice. The whole ladder is on one page; the app behind it is free to start - the door opens to any address. Education only. Pumpstradamus is a paper trading app: no real money is traded, and we are not a broker or an adviser.