So the Rockies are in the World Series and that has a lot of people excited. I am one of those people, but not because I really care about baseball. I have probably watched a total of 9 innings of baseball in the last year. I got excited because I saw an opportunity to make money!! The trader in me sensed a potential opportunity this evening to get some Rockies tickets with the intent to sell them at a MUCH higher price than what I would pay. Rockies tickets went on sale online at 10AM local time and after a few minutes the overwhelming traffic shut the system down after only 500 of the 15,000 or so tickets available were sold (they say the site received 8.5 million hits). Baseball fans were pissed off because a couple of days before, a plan to sell tickets at the stadium was shut down in favor of a “more orderly online process”. This afternoon the Rockies issued a press release that said they would announce how they would sell the remaining tickets in a press conference to be held at 5PM. I sensed an opportunity to teach my boys about how to anticipate (like a stock setup) and be in front of an emotional crowd (the fans) so we could sell to them at a higher price later. At 4:30 we headed downtown with the intention of being in a position to be able to purchase tickets at the Coors Stadium box office. I was thinking that since the online process was such a debacle, the team management might decide to sell tickets directly to local fans only. I explained to my boys that the risk was simple, time.. but we would eat dinner downtown if we didn’t get tickets so that was the worst case. If we were able to actually purchase tickets I promised them that they would each share in 25% of the profits of any tickets we were able to sell at a higher price, they were obviously excited! So we got downtown and got in line, we were actually ninth in line and the crowd swelled to several hundred over the next 30-45 minutes, you could really sense the anticipation of the crowd (probably like being on a trading floor). After standing around for about 30 minutes, a homeless man came by and asked “are tickets on sale or something?” to which the guy in front of me said “no” and the homeless guy asked “why’s everyone in line then?” it was classic! The most obvious question was asked by the guy who would unfortunately be sleeping under a bridge tonight. The point is, there was a perception that there might be an opportunity and in real life it doesn’t work the way it often does in the markets where “perception is reality”… The homeless guy got it right, there were no ticket sales tonight, so we spent an hour in line for nothing, but it was a great lesson for the boys and we had a nice dinner too. The Rockies still haven’t decided how they will sell the remaining tickets, but if I can get my hands on some I’ll probably watch a few innings on TV at home and my boys will be thinking of ways to spend their mini fortunes after I take a large portion and invest it for them.