My bizarre introduction to stocks

Serendipity.

That sums up how I got into stocks.

During a university alumni homecoming which I attended (reluctantly, I should say), my name was chosen as a winner of a raffle contest. The emcee beamed and slowly announced (drums roll) the price: a board lot of shares of stock of Alcorn Petroleum and Minerals Corp., (PSE: APM) , a junior oil wildcatter then, courtesy of an alumna who happened to own a stock brokerage house. 
                                                                                                                                                              
It didn't register with me. I had only the faintest idea of what stocks are, what the company was doing, or how to trade stocks. The lady donor said that I have to get the prize at their office and all she gave was a note scrawled on a small piece of paper with her signature.

What a prize, I thought. I inserted the paper in my wallet and forgot all about it.

Months later, the Social Security System (SSS) offered to divest part of its shareholdings in electricity distributor Manila Electric Company (PSE: MER) to its members (all working people are). The beautiful part is, no cash out was needed; all one had to do was sign a promissory note that payment would be made in monthly installments through salary deduction. I signed in.

Then I remembered that piece of paper. At about this time, an oil discovery off the coast of Palawan named West Linapacan was announced in the papers. There I saw that APM was one of the consortium members, albeit a minor one.

That got me excited and went to the brokerage house mentioned and claimed my prize. The signature was honored, but I had to come back after two weeks, because the share ownership had to be transferred to my name. I saw my first stock certificate (scripless trading did not exist then) which looked like a diploma to me. But I still didn't know what to do with it. The value was a few hundred pesos.

The real break came when then government-owned Philippine National Oil Company (PNOC) conducted an initial public offering or IPO of shares of its subsidary Petron Corp. (PSE: PCOR) as part of the privatization of government assets in the middle 90's. I used to work for another subsidiary of PNOC, so we employees were given a chance to obtain IPO shares. Again, payment was through salary deduction, but the shares have a lock-up provision of 365 days or one year. That means we could not sell those shares within that period.

By law, major shareholders of a company undergoing an IPO will have their remaining shares subject to lock-up for 6 months to one year. This is to prevent manipulation of prices by insiders, among others.

The IPO was a big event. It was considered the catalyst for the growth of the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) from lethargy.

I got to know a broker to trade stocks for me, and there was no stopping from here.

It was curious education for me. You dear readers,  are luckier with information you need  are now freely flowing.

Epilogue: The share prices of PCOR soared weeks immediately after its IPO but we could only scratched our heads since our shares were under lock-up. I disposed of my APM shares which I obtained for free, but MER tanked. That was because the Company was ordered to reimburse some P 32 billion to its customers when the High Court ruled that the company has been overcharging its customers for years through a technicality.