MONDAY
A SENSE of deep gloom and utter idleness stalked the Phantom Daytrading Syndicate. Never in my life's experience of investing has so little been done by so few.
Inertia is the great enemy of the investor. One lapses into a sort of dazed stupor, which can last for weeks.
The first symptoms are easy to detect: an abject unwillingness to move your cash to a better bank account; a diehard reluctance to invest in a share when all the lights are flashing green, and all your mates say, "Gowon, give it a go."
But most of us just sit and think. Or just sit. Indeed, it has a lot to do with the collective state of the human mind these days: we're too superstitious. Action based on reason terrifies us. The Age of Reason is dead, and all that remains is a superstitious hunch.
Indeed, we're devolving into a sort of pre-Enlightenment barbaric tribe whose daily routine is set by the start of Underbelly. The Age of Neo-barbarism will probably end with another world war. It always does. Soon we'll be building caves again, and I dread the day I find webbing between my toes. The swamp will be just a step - or a hop - away.
TUESDAY
I knew we should have seized the day and borrowed a million dollars against our dwindling capital and plunged back into the greatest investment opportunity in history.
But we didn't. We just dangled on the edge, like rabid fruit bats hanging from a dead bough.
Yogi, our senior chartist, swatted a fly with his Rio Tinto share chart. Doomsday, our bear market analyst, studied his notes for a sad book called The Downwave Theory: How I Predicted The Global Financial Crisis. Byron Dawn, our leisure industries analyst, just sort of idled away the afternoon.
Never had I seen such terrible inertia; never had apathy and superstition so completely overwhelmed our will to act.
WEDNESDAY
As I said, the condition is almost impossible to shrug off, and persisted.
Not even the arrival of the Mullumbimby Monetarists - all 20 of them - dressed in rags the colour of dawn, smelling of bush herbs, animated us.
The MMs are a colony of unemployed who have invested their dole for 10 years and are now worth about $10 million.
But they refuse to change their lifestyles. The Government seems not to realise that they still receive the dole, like most of the voluntary unemployed daytraders north of Coffs. Wearing rags to Centrelink helps, of course.
We hoped to take the Monetarists out for lunch, but our club wouldn't admit them. So we attended the Union Club alone: me, Yogi, FastCash and Doomsday, the hardcore, the pioneers.
The union is our old mate in hard times; normally they wouldn't let people like us in, but these are hard times.
Indeed, today they even let Tony Abbott in. The Mad Monk sat beside us, with some of his mates. And I couldn't help overhearing their conversation - something along the lines of:
"Yeah, Malcolm's gonna lose the next election; but then Pete'll return as leader, and he'll lead us to victory. But Rudd's got the next one in the bag."
It was rather devastating news, the return of Costello. We hadn't counted on candour from a senior shadow cabinet member, over lunch.
THURSDAY
The worst piece of news from the G20 summit, to which we'd been rudely uninvited, was the crackdown on tax havens.
Never in my life had I heard such nonsense. If upstanding citizens can't squirrel away their hard-earned cash to some safe haven beyond the reach of this meddlesome big government - which wants to blow our savings on a $42 billion "rescue plan" and a laptop for every kiddie - then what's the point of saving?
The daytraders should concede an interest. We've got savings in: Jersey, Switzerland, Labuan, Campione, Liechtenstein, Malta, Vanuatu and the Turks and Caicos. Oh, and Sark, when it isn't submerged by rising tides thanks to all this global warming. Sark's bankers wear goggles and snorkels at high tide - not a pretty sight. Then again, they're not a pretty sight without the goggles and snorkels.
The locals didn't take kindly to the T-shirts we wore on our last visit: Where the fark is Sark? Yogi thought the locals would see the joke, on a half-submerged island. But no, you can't make anyone laugh these days, not in the midst of a global financial crisis.
FRIDAY
Our gloomy mood plunged into a deeper abyss, and Doomsday was put on seasonal suicide watch.
