Print a keyboard on sturdy paper (possibly over sized) and pair the kids. Have one kid "type" and the other kid check. Make them compete. Should be fun!

Uhhh. In order to illustrate the volatility it needs to be log scale. How else could you compare a change in 50 % when Dow Jones is 100 compared to 13000. Anyway, here is a graph of volatility of Dow Jones . http://schwert.ssb.rochester.edu/usvol.pdf . As you can see our volatility is quiet low compared to the thirties. Anyone who thinks a bit will understand that the claim that prices are somehow crazy nowadays compared to the good old days cannot be true, since it would mean that good dividend paying companies could be bought cheap by the simple strategy of entering a buy order with a low price. No HFT algorithm can buy below your order. Of course there are differences to the thirties. For example the volatility within a tenth of a second is much higher.

What you say is not true. Here is a good blog post explaining and illustrating the volatility the last 100 years: http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.co.il/2012/06/market-volatility.html . Dan

What you say is nonsense. If it was true that stock prices bounce around like a drug addict I would be rich long ago. Remember that a company is a real asset. If the price goes down for whatever reason, just buy it and happily collect the dividend in Hawaii forever. As long as you have a buy order at a particular price no HF trader can trade below it. Dan

Start from your own strength! You have a handicap and you know the kind of support someone like you need. So do a simple game to help you remember things. Don't be too ambitious. Do something really simple that works and build it out in small stages, always keeping it working (google "agile" if you want to know more about this way of working). Perhaps look at memrise.com for inspiration and think about how you could enhance something like this for someone with your particular issues. Think of special areas, there is more to remembering then vocabulary(people, situations, sounds, music, procedures, short term vs long term) . Think about how in what way a game could support a particular problem YOU have. When you have a prototype (even a simple one) you might be able to get support, since having the handicap yourself will give you a great story and in this way you can turn your handicap into a a real advantage. Perhaps you will even be able to partner with someone that can help you with the bits that are too specialized for you to do handle yourself. But to get that you first need a prototype game. Most important of all. Have fun developing it and try to find someone you can show off when it works! We all need this! In this way everything else is a bonus. Dan

Thanks for the concrete examples! I wish there were food products that were sensibly grown without dogmas. At the moment, unless you grow things yourself, it is hard to find anything between overpriced fundamentalist grown so called "ecologic" vegetables and watery unvaried produce for "the masses"!

Great, so short the stock if you think the value of Apple is high because owners are victims of a cheap tease. When you get rich, make a great party with free strippers for all!

Yes, you are right. If the price of the stock goes down enough we might see someone buying up Apple , cashing in the dividend, lending money using the assets you mention as collateral and put Apple back on the market burdened with debt. This is not uncommon with smaller cash rich companies, but I could imagine it happening to Apple if they "do a RIM".

Thanks for making some sense!

No this is the price of the stock. It is important to distinguish the market price and the fundamental or intrinsic value. Of course we cannot normally know the precise value of a stock but it is nonetheless something we can define. And we can check it historically, after the company has been liquidated. For example you can compare the precise intrinsic value of US Steel at February 26 1932 by adding up all its dividends and compare it to its market value on the same day (if the market was open) . If you muddle these two concepts you lose a valuable conceptual tool for understanding.

Since this is a forum for nerds I would expect you to substantiate your claims by some data. This is however unlikely since if your claim was true I would have been rich long ago. If stock prices were, as you say, "totally based on subjective perception" I can think of many sure ways to become rich, such as buying high dividend stocks or buying stocks in companies that are expected to liquidate within the foreseeable future. Or I could pool my money with other people and just buy up companies on the market for a low price and run them for their future profit. The fact is that it is hard to predict the future and combined with our herd instinct (try it yourself: buy a stock when everyone screams that the end is near - it is sooo hard) valuations will change. But as the the father of value investing, Benjamin Graham, explained in the short run, the market is like a voting machine--tallying up which firms are popular and unpopular. But in the long run, the market is like a weighing machine--assessing the substance of a company.

The fundamental value of a stock is the sum of future payouts in the form of dividends, spinoffs or liquidation. For companies with finite resources, such as a mining company, this is easier to compute than for a technology company like Apple. But if Apple would never pay a dividend or spin off parts, the value of the stock is zero. The discussion above shows a remarkable lack of understanding of the basics of capitalism. The only reason not to pay a dividend is that the money is better invested in the company now so that it will generate even higher profits for the owners in the future.