ShareThisAargh. You're out of cash, you're awash in heavily margined stocks that are plummeting and war just broke out in the Middle East.
Having fun yet?
Clearwater, Fla., orthopedic surgeon/game enthusiast John Barrett is counting on it, having invested $50,000 of materials and staff time into creating and marketing his Play the Stock Market board game.
Anyone trying to sell a new board game in this era of the Wii, Guitar Hero and high-definition video has to be a bit of a risk taker. Especially when that game is based on navigating the tricky world of trading stocks and bonds, an arena that might intimidate some prospective players just looking for fun.
Then again, in market-speak, you might not want to sell Barrett short. The 69-year-old entrepreneur, perhaps best known as founder of the Florida Knee and Orthopedic Centers, has a knack for good timing.
Barrett sold properties -- including a hotel and a shopping center -- before the commercial real estate market started drying up. He pulled his money out of the stock market -- $20 million -- in early 2008, avoiding this past fall's carnage. And he's kept much of the stash in cash since then. "Cash is a good investment," he says.
Now his passion is peddling a Monopoly-esque board game that he hopes will educate middle America that the stock market isn't as complicated as some experts would have you believe.
There's no better time to encourage financial education and make it fun, he said, than during this economic upheaval.
After all, the model for his game was also born in tumultuous times. Charles Darrow, an unemployed domestic heater salesman from suburban Philadelphia, created the popularized version of Monopoly in 1933 during the peak of the Great Depression.
Unlike Darrow, Barrett will be competing against cable TV, the Internet and an endless barrage of video games. But he's encouraged that board-game sales are in a resurgence as families search for cheaper entertainment.
In 2008, board-game sales rose 24 percent to top $800 million. This year, consumer research group IBISWorld projects another 5.1 percent jump to $834 million in sales, or nearly 37 million games sold.
Of course, board games are far removed from their heyday in the 1980s and represent a fraction of the $21 billion video-game industry. And IBISWorld spokeswoman Savannah Haspel says the forecast is for board-game sales to slump 7 percent in 2010 once the economy recovers and "more people will revert back to electronic games and other forms of entertainment."
Barrett's resume indicates he doesn't like to sit still for long.
After training in orthopedics at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, he worked at a leper colony in New Orleans studying how their condition affected pressure points in their feet and similarities to rheumatoid-arthritis patients. That led to developing a patent for a shoe targeting arthritis patients.
Barrett began to specialize in knee surgery in the late 1970s and was among the first orthopedic surgeons in the United States to use an arthroscope. In 1983, he founded the Florida Knee and Orthopedic Centers, which grew to handle a fourth of all joint replacements in Pinellas County.
In the '90s, he began traveling frequently to Romania to teach courses in advanced orthopedic surgery techniques, which led to a scholarship and mentoring program bringing Romanian surgeons to the United States. "That was unquestionably my life's most enriching experience," he says. "It was fabulous."
The shift from health-care education to fiscal education, he says, came naturally.
With most board games in the $30 range, the game's initial version is on the high end, priced at $59.95. "But it's a lot classier than the average board game and a lot more educational," Barrett said.
For more information, visit www.stockmarketthegame.com.
(Jeff Harrington can be reached at jharrington(at)sptimes.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service www.scrippsnews.com)
Must credit the St. Petersburg Times
