One year. That was how long my relationship with the stock market has been. But there was a pre-story, which was training, lots of training, before I found the heart to jump in and play for real.

Flashback to 2008, giddy and excited and with fake money at hand, I started with the online stock exchange (it offered a practice account). Prepped by my financial planner, pumped up with some reading I had done here and there and some monitoring of the market, I found I gained some fake USD$600 in a few months. But I since I was in no real danger of getting poor or rich, I soon found myself bored. The market bottomed out too, wiping my gains, but ironically, it was also the perfect time to get in for real, to play for real.

Last night, I did not know what to expect.

My mind was filled with doomsday scenarios. After all, it is election time in present day Philippines. It is the first automated voting in the country, which was precipitated by calls for manual counting – the PCOS (precinct count optical scan) machines from Smartmatic were conking out, the mock elections (the rehearsals) did not go as expected, the practice votes were not counted accurately – and then there was the usual election fare – mud slinging, vote buying, violence.

The election bug bit long and it bit hard, raising the temperature of the country to fever pitch.

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