Rob Redstone - Apfelbaum, Inc.

During the late 1970’s and the height of the inflation driven stamp market there was a crazy person who pretended to be a stamp dealer who came regularly to our auctions. Rob Redstone was about 30 and dressed dramatically, talked loudly and always was making phone calls which we felt were calls on which there was no one else on the other end of the line. The calls were about buying pork belly futures or thousands of shares of “stock x” and all the while he had trouble scrounging up $1500 to pay his stamp auction bill. When the bottom dropped out of stamp speculation in 1980, Rob disappeared and over the years I had wondered what happened to him. Last weekend I was in the center of Philadelphia with a few minutes to kill before meeting my wife. I went for a cup of coffee and seated in the coffee shop was Rob Redstone, now about 60 and dressed in a more modern dramatic style though considerably more threadbare than I had remembered him being. We said hello and he asked me to join him and without my asking told me how much money he had made over the years in dot coms and the housing market and lately in gold. He told me he planned to “take a big position in Facebook IPO shares this fall”. Now I don’t know if Rob has been successful or not but to me he is the perfect example of the man, always being at the cutting edge of everything has left himself cut off and with nothing-always chasing, never finding.

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