Thanks to the PDF, he bought Rp 500,000 worth.
He felt guilty about the pirated PDF. So he found a legal Indonesian translation at a bookstore in Gramedia — the real, printed Buku Peter Lynch Bahasa Indonesia . He bought two copies. One for himself. One for his little brother.
On the first page of his legal copy, he wrote:
Arga was a junior accountant in Jakarta. Every month, after paying rent and sending money to his mother in Bandung, he had exactly Rp 850,000 left. He knew he should invest it, but the stock market felt like a casino for rich people.
He never downloaded a shady PDF again. But he never forgot the one that taught him to see a stock in a bowl of bakso .
Lynch wrote: "Invest in what you know."
The PDF was terrible. Page 12 was blurry. Page 34 was upside down. But the words hit him like es campur on a hot day.
Arga didn't understand derivatives or global macro trends. But he knew food. Every lunch, he saw his coworkers lining up for seblak and bakso from a small vendor named "Mak Yeye." The line was always long. The vendor just opened a second cart.
