I finished the collage in the early 80s, which I guess makes me a dinosaur, but at least a dinosaur with memories. One of the memories I took away from collage, which I didn’t fully understand until the last five years, was the mantra of one of my economics professors repeatedly telling me along with the rest of the class that “…in the En In the future, society will be divided into digital symbol manipulators and hamburger flippers.” We always wondered what the hell the old man was talking about and never gave it much thought. After all, wouldn’t society need a wide range of players between those two extremes? This was long before I had even heard of the actions of Pink Sheets or Richard Bond.

The times change. No one can predict the future. Who would have thought that a nice guy from Texas would end up living in Las Vegas and working for a young man from New York who people refer to as the “boy in the pink sheets”? It was after meeting Pink Sheets Guy that I began to understand why the future was going to belong to a new generation of entrepreneurs; The digital symbol manipulator. The past century has shown that while the traditional standard of wealth, land ownership, will never go away, new wealth generators have evolved alongside technological advances. Oil, manufacturing, media, pharmaceuticals, the list of new wealth generators expanded rapidly. Twenty years before the start of the new century, the creation of the personal computer ushered in the information age. The age of the digital symbol manipulator. The era of online trading, the era of Pink Sheets stocks, and the traders who focused on Pink Sheets stocks.

While the PC emerged in the information age, it was the Internet with its rapid access to information that enabled the rise of people who could create wealth simply by being able to interpret digital symbols, also read as understanding information or data, acting consequently. – also read as manipulate – and benefit from it. The best examples of this formula are people who trade stocks online using the information they have gathered online to make decisions about when they want to buy and trade. The best personal example I know of in reference to this new pan of entrepreneurs is my colleague and friend, Richard Bond.

As I wrote before, no one can predict the future, they certainly couldn’t, and who knows, if I knew in advance that I would be taking orders from a guy twelve years younger than me, a guy who drains me with his energy, maybe I would have tried choosing another. path in life. Maybe she could have chosen a different path, and maybe she would have been a lot less happy about it.

Richard is what I consider to be the quintessential digital symbol manipulator. I don’t mean it as an insult; I mean he is a testament to what my collage teacher had said. Richard moved to Las Vegas in 2002 after driving from New York in a broken-down old Dodge Dart with two suitcases containing everything he owned in the world. He was looking for a way to rebuild his life. He had studied for a year at the University at Albany Business School, but he couldn’t afford to continue his education and had accepted a low-paying job at the New York brokerage firm. He was stuck until a girl dumped him (I wonder if she remembers his name, I don’t) and he decided to make a big life change.

When he first came to Las Vegas, he lived out of his car until he made enough money waiting tables to pay the rent on a one-bedroom apartment. It was in this seedy little place that he founded Richard Bond & Associates in 2004, buying and selling Pink Sheets shares over the Internet. At the end of 2004 he started recruiting partners. I met him at a Las Vegas convention center during a trade show and was impressed with his energy and knowledge, enough that I bet on taking a job with him. A decision I have never regretted, maybe once. By the end of 2005, Richard had become rich many times over and made his associates very comfortable. He had established himself as one of the new digital symbol manipulating entrepreneurs.

Last year he wrote a book explaining the actions of Pink Sheets and I have to admit:

“The Pink Sheets: The Ultimate Guide to Making Money on Pink Sheets Stocks”
exemplify my teacher’s prediction. Those who can learn to understand images and information data become rich and comfortable, those who cannot or do not want to learn are doomed to make hamburgers.