Everything Old Is New Again


Wherein Our Heroine Visits the Old Neighborhood.
I used to work for NASDAQ (hence my cheap swipe at Dick Grasso the other day - but hey, has anyone ever seen him stand next to the Six Flags Dancing Man? Have they?). I was at the market during the great bubble and the start of the great popping of same, I left for a job in New England and I came back to it about a year later when my New England job was about to turn into a New Jersey job. Fun fact: the NASDAQ Composite's valuation when I returned to work for the market in 2002 was about 200 points lower than it had been when I originally joined up in 1998. It was the best of times and the worst of times, but which was which?

I used to have a terminal bursting with information about equities and more esoteric forms of investment. I had plenty of colleagues who were active investors, who loved the ride - loved to pit their wits and skill against the market. Mostly they ended up even, as lucky investors dabbling in small equities do. I was never keen to waste my substance on figuring out which company was going to be The Next Big Thing. Part of it was because I was (and am) risk-averse by nature when it comes to putting down my own cold cash. Part of it was that I had little extra substance to waste. And mostly it was because I was like the woman who works in the candy store: I lost whatever taste I might have had for playing the market because I worked for the market.

Now it is several months since I have looked at a screen frantically blinking with green and red numbers, and it appears that someone has taken the world of blogging and turned it into a fantasy stock market game. Perhaps it is that I now have some distance from the candy store, but I am finding this more than vaguely interesting. It takes the term "Marketplace of Ideas" and realizes it in clickable electrons. Ideas, memes and "karma" all start to get valued in imaginary dollars. A blog's valuation is set by incoming links from other blogs and orders by the players. All in all, it mimics the multiple influences of a real stock market pretty well.

As for WoT? Well, since they took my alternate URLs on board, it has graduated from being a complete penny stock, but it's definitely languishing in that sub-$10 place that many stocks (in the real world) never recover from. Thank goodness this is a labor of love.
Posted: Wednesday - July 07, 2004 at 08:07 AM         | |

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