Every day the market teaches me about life and the dilemmas we face. Take yesterday, for example, when I sold some - but not all - BHP shares at $58. This morning they dropped to $56.88 and I regretted not having sold even more yesterday.
Believing that they had bottomed, I placed an order at $57 to buy back the shares I had sold yesterday, but by the time I had placed the order, the shares had already gone up to $57.50 again. Then they went back to yesterday's closing price of $57.75. I was facing an emotional dilemma: I wanted the price to go down to buy back the shares I had sold, and I wanted the price to go up to increase the value of the shares I still had.
Peter Singer's book "How are we to live? - Ethics in an age of self-interest" is full of examples of dilemmas — from the Ancient Greek dílēmma, meaning "two premises", and adopted into English to describe a rhetorical argument forcing a choice between two equally undesirable options. And here I face a dilemma: appear superior by using a word you don't know, or patronise you by telling you what you already know. (Not the best example, I know, but I'm Peter Goerman, not Peter Singer.)
Unfortunately, the book is not available for online reading, unless you can read German — if you can't read German, why not? give us half a chance and ve haf vays to make you talk! — in which case click here.
It's now after four o'clock. What happened to BHP's shares? They closed at $58.41, twelve cents higher than yesterday's all-time intraday high, and sixty-six cents higher than yesterday's closing price. Go figure!
P.S. At the start of the year BHP was $45.76. By the end of January it had gone to $50.57 which I thought was a good time to sell. Luckily, I only sold a few shares because by the end of February they had gone to $58.41, an unbelievable increase of 27% for a heavyweight like BHP.
