One trade involved a date with Alice Cooper. Go figure.
This worked more from notoriety than arbitrage, IMNSHO. However, he did manage to get an entire house in 14 trades starting with a bent piece of wire coated in red plastic.
A 26-year-old Montreal man appears to have succeeded in his quest to barter a single, red paper-clip all the way up to a house.
It took almost a year and 14 trades, but Kyle MacDonald has been offered a two-storey farmhouse in Kipling, Sask., for a paid role in a movie.
MacDonald began his quest last summer when he decided he wanted to live in a house. He didn’t have a job, so instead of posting a resumé, he looked at a red paper-clip on his desk and decided to trade it on an internet website.
It also demonstrates the value of perseverance. If you ask often enough, you’ll find what you’re looking for.
This is inspiring in some strange way. Reminds me of the 1Mill pixel guy. Just shows what a person can do with some creativity and the right blogs
Now how is he going to pay the taxes on said house?
oo oo … I know! With a pencil!
that is just a fun story. I suppose anything is possible if you do it right.
Now we get Bush out of the white house…..
I have a paper clip 😛
You’ll have to make 0 trades over the next 2 years for that.
My cousin bought a house in Manitoba, just next door to Saskatchewan, a few years back. It cost $2000. Yep, a whole house in move-in condition. Rural communities are depopulating for lack of jobs on the Canadian prairies. There are a LOT of problems in Saskatchewan. In rural areas: Isolation. Meth labs moving in. Marijuana farms. Driving 50 miles to buy groceries. Nasty winters. In urban areas you’ve got native gangs, high unemployment and crime.
If he’d gotten a house in Montreal (where houses are valued at hundreds of thousands of C$), that would have been something different. Frankly there are a lot of houses in Saskatchewan that I wouldn’t trade a paperclip for.