How to make one cent worth a honest day work

Well, one cent is something certainly not surprising to anyone.

I mean, it's common for most people who walk around the street and notice a 1 cent coin on the floor to simply keep straigth ahead on their path without even considering picking this rather smallish coin from the ground - what can you do with a single cent?


So how do you make a single cent be worth a honest day of work?


Crazy as it may be, a solution to make a significant amount of money from a cent seems to be stock exchange.

Early this month I've invested some money on a portuguese company called "Pararede" - they build the most popular portable machines for ATM transactions and each of their stocks is worth around 16 cents.

In the economy world - January was a very, very tough month for stocks as crisis arised with more sub-prime concerns and most of the market fell with fear and panic - and pararede also got cheaper, being sold at 11 cents.

Imagine you buy some stocks at 15 cents and use around 1000 euros of your money for this operation.

If you're lucky - (and I use this term because I don't think we common mortals can predict the future) - then you might sell your wallet with a profit of a single cent per stock.

How profitable is the trade on this example if I sold at 16 cents per stock?

~6,6%..

You get back your money with a profit of 65 euros on this case after a few days worth of waiting and win a full day of work without even need to get out of home.

So I guess that 1 cent can be very important.


btw: It's good when things work as you expect but don't expect to always get lucky - these are not good days to risk your hard earned savings on stocks unless you really know what the risks are and prepare yourself to assume the losses when things go bad.

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I mention early on this blog post that few people would ever pick a 1 cent coin from the floor but this article was written because my wife found one of these coins in the shopping mall after a dinner outside and the smile on her face really teached me how a single coin made her day so happy regardless of it's actual value to buy things.


And now I'm really in doubt on how people react to this situation - would you ignore a 1 cent coin on the floor?


-- Nuno Brito