In 1993 I married a Swedish Girl and moved to Sweden. I was raised in Southern California and lived by the beach. Surfing and fishing were my favorite pastime and still are. I didn't really know how good it was to live in Southern California until I left it. I also didn't realize how active of a life I led and how that lifestyle was in a big part due to the sunny California weather.
Sweden is a great place, don't get me wrong. The nature is unbelievable, the winters are pretty extreme though. Spring and fall are well, not much better, the summers are unfortunately, hit or miss.
I found myself indoors and looking for something to keep me occupied. Watching TV was never my thing though I did love to watch American Football. But I was in Sweden, at that time I think we had 10 channels. American Football was not a sport that the Swedes were that excited about, just understanding the game is hard if not impossible if you are not from the USA or have someone to explain it to you.
To keep me occupied I decided that I would try to learn how to use a computer. The internet had basically just started to reach commercialization and computers had become relatively cheap (compared to what they cost a few years earlier). So I bought a computer and started learning how to use it.
It was pretty neat. I could keep up with the football scores and stay in contact with my parents. My Dad had always said I needed to learn how to use the computer and that the computer was the future and he was of coarse right. I dove in and really got into it. I am a pretty fast learner so I was up and running in no time.
Not knowing anyone in Sweden and living in a small town I found it diffacult to make new friends.I was introduced to a few of my wife's friends and most of her relatives and luckily most Swedes speak pretty good English.
One of those friends was a guy by the name of Magnus. Magnus and my wife had gone to High School together . At the time Magnus was studying finance in college and was planning to work as a stock market analyst. His dream was to eventually manage a fund and live in New York.
Magnus was super brainy and was not like any of my previous friends. Me being in construction while living in the USA and pretty much an average Joe. Lets just put it this way, there are not many surfers that are interested in finance.
What made us click was that he was almost more American than me. He liked Baseball and football (though he did not totally understand the game he had a good idea about how it worked). After visiting my parents back in the States that summer I brought three baseball mitts a hardball and a bat back to Sweden. Magnus already had a football. We would play catch and hit the ball around. Sometimes his brother would join us or another friend of his so we wouldn't get bored with each others company. Afterwards, over a couple of beers, he would ask me all kinds of questions about how it was to have been brought up in America and what it was like to go to High School there. What it was like to live in California. We would talk for hours.
Not wanting to just talk about me, I started to ask Magnus about what he was studying. He told me about the stock market and tried to explain to me how it worked, he showed me some charts of different stocks that he had printed out and we went on the computer and he showed me stocks that he was interested in and the stocks he was invested in.
I found out from Magnus's mom that he had been investing in the stock market since he was about 10 years old! Magnus had not only been investing he had been making ok money at it. Me not having a job in Sweden at the time, the stock market might be a way to make a couple of bucks.
I went on the computer and would read all I could about the best brokers and about Fundamental analysis and something call Technical analysis. I asked Magnus a lot more questions and found out he was learning how to analyze company's balance sheet and would even analyse their forward looking prospects. It was way over my head. Plus there was a lot of Math involved, Math was something that I hated, I had only barely passed algebra. I asked Magnus about technical analysis. He found it interesting but said that Technical Analysis was not anything that was taught in College. It was kind of frowned on in fact. Many in academia looked upon technical analysis as a bunch of hokus-pokus. I borrowed a couple of books on the subject anyway from Magnus and read those. I went on Amazon and bought more books about trading and a few more books on technical analysis.
I bought some technical analysis software called MetaStock. I was hooked!
(Side Note) Magnus is now running a High Tech European fund in New York.
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