Phantasmix Stock Blog

WOW! I found this both funny (I actually laughed out loud) and fascinating.

In short – handling money (compared with handling paper) reduces stress from loneliness, as well as physical pain from hot water. Somehow it makes a lot of sense, but also seems crazy.

The threshold must be different for everyone, but as the saying goes “everyone has a price”.

In ‘The symbolic power of money: reminders of money alter social distress and physical pain’ published in the journal Psychological Science, Xinyue Zhou, Kathleen Vohs and Roy Baumeister explored how money could reduce a person’s feeling of pain and also negate their need for social popularity.

Harriet de Wit, Faculty Member for f1000 Medicine, said: “This research extends our understanding of relationships between social pain and physical pain, and remarkably, shows how acquired symbolic value of money, perhaps because of associations with power or control, can influence responses to both emotional and physical pain.”

She also noted: “These findings have great importance for a social system such as ours that is characterized by wide disparities in financial wellbeing.”

Zhou, Vohs and Baumeister determined that interpersonal rejection and physical pain caused desire for money to increase. They said: “Money can possibly substitute for social acceptance in conferring the ability to obtain benefits from the social system. Moreover, past work has suggested that responses to physical pain and social distress share common underlying mechanisms.”

“Handling money (compared with handling paper) reduced distress over social exclusion and diminished the physical pain of immersion in hot water. Being reminded of having spent money, however, intensified both social distress and physical pain,” the authors said.

More information: The full text of the evaluation of “The Symbolic Power of Money: Reminders of Money Alter Social Distress and Physical Pain” is available free for 90 days at http://www.f1000medicine.com/article/r2111rwty080l4q/id/1163818 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02353.x

Source: Faculty of 1000: Biology and Medicine

Amazing. Today’s WTF find, with W being “why???” in this case.

She lived in a tiny one-bedroom cottage in Lake Forest, Ill.

She bought her clothes at rummage sales, didn’t own a car and worked most of her life as a secretary for a pharmaceutical company.

Yet after her death at age 100, Grace Groner left Lake Forest College a gift of $7 million to be used for scholarships. The money came from three shares of stock she bought — and held on to — in 1935.

Here’s an odd observation (not mine): when people are offered 70% returns they think it’s a scam and majority will avoid investing in the venture. When they’re offered a 200% return, however, they break down and pay up!

Just watched NewsRadio, episode “Stocks” (every sitcom has an episode about stocks, right?).

Beth, the secretary, got several stock tips from billionaire station owner Jimmy James and instead of following them, she sold the tips to someone else.

Beth: I don’t understand. All I did was sell someone something I didn’t even own in the first place that wasn’t worth anything.

Jimmy: Like I said, welcome to the world of high finance!

Re-reading Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre, here’s a possibly relevant excerpt from the book:

One day I saw in the Paris Herald a dispatch from New York that Smelters had declared an extra dividend. They had run up the price of the stock and the entire market had come back quite strong. Of course that changed everything for me in Aix. The news simply meant that the bull cliques were still fighting desperately against conditions – against common sense and against common honesty, for they knew what was coming and were resorting to such schemes to put up the market in order to unload stocks before the storm struck them. It is possible they really did not believe the danger was as serious or as close at hand as I thought. The big men of the Street are as prone to be wishful thinkers as the politicians or the plain suckers. I myself can’t work that way. In a speculator such an attitude is fatal. Perhaps a manufacturer of securities or a promoter of new enterprises can afford to indulge in hope-jags.