Inside trading: how prisoners in America got into stocks

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Prisoners know, from both the markets and life, that past performance is no guarantee of future results. There has been a pandemic boom in stock trades behind bars. From 1843 magazine

t’s Monday evening and Nick walks in with the latest issue of– a ritual at the start of our investing week. With a giddy smile, he opens the magazine in front of me and we dig in, hunting for potential buys.

Then, crucially, the government stepped in with covid-relief funds, which were somehow granted to prisoners. That windfall came as a total shock. When Nick first heard prisoners might be eligible to get the money, he laughed in disbelief. “After 20 years of listening to rumour after rumour in prison, one thing I know is that the ones with good news are almost never true. This time I was wrong,” Nick said.

Plenty on the inside lost money on cryptocurrencies too. Prisoners, just like normies on the outside, gambled on faddish coins. I wasn’t immune to the crypto fad, though I thought I was being clever about it. I invested in publicly traded cryptocurrency companies, such as Bitcoin miners. After being up briefly, I’m down more than 50% on those bets.

Most prisoners don’t know much about money, much less stocks. We are far more likely to have been raised on food stamps and free lunch than to have a college fund. Many among us never had a job, never paid a bill, never opened a bank account. Some became adults still thinking “withdrawal from savings” was a ritual involving a clay pig and a hammer.

Incarceration leads, more often than not, to life-long poverty, which in turn can lead many back to prison. A working knowledge of finance offers hope to break this vicious cycle. If you were to visit our prison, sit at our dayroom’s steel table and pitch us on a company to invest in, you should have your figures straight. We will want to know the fundamentals like price-to-earnings ratio, price-to-sales, price-to-book value and so on.

 

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