Where Price
Remembers

My relationship with money started long before I opened a trading account. It started in Samar, a large, mostly rural island in the eastern Visayas, the central part of the Philippines, in a household where money was always the first thing to run out. By any honest measure, we were poor.

I want to begin there because every trade I have ever made carried a little of that house with it.

“We don’t have the money”

Whenever I asked for something as a child, my parents gave me the same answer: “We don’t have the money. Study hard, so you can buy whatever you want someday.”

They weren’t being unkind. They were telling me the truth, and they were handing me the only plan they could see. Both of them were government employees. With five children to raise (I have four siblings), they covered our needs and still found a way to keep all of us in school. I didn’t understand at the time what that cost them. I understand it better now that I have children of my own. Education was the one thing they could give us that nobody could take back, so they paid for it, whatever it took.

Growing up like that teaches you early that life is hard without enough money. There were nights when dinner was instant noodles stretched with extra water so everyone could have something before bed. You don’t forget meals like that.

A ten-year-old’s first business

My first financial lesson had nothing to do with investing. It was about scarcity: learning, very young, the difference between wanting something and being able to afford it.

When I was about ten, I started collecting empty bottles and scrap metal and selling them. The money was tiny. But it meant I could buy a snack without asking my parents for money they didn’t have, and that felt enormous. Looking back, it was a child’s version of running a business. I had a small cash-flow problem, and I solved it with the only resources I had: time, legs, and whatever other people threw away.

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