Lottery Ticket

Wherein Our Heroine Ponders Chance.

I have a lottery ticket. I got it in a birthday card yesterday. The truck driver from Frederick County, VA who waited for so long to claim his staggering prize collected his massive check yesterday as well.

That kind of money all at once is almost too boggling to consider, and it rarely happens outside the lottery setting. But I worked for Nasdaq from 1998 to 2001 and I saw lottery-type riches pile up almost instantaneously with a mind-numbing regularity. Mostly those riches were "paper wealth" and a lot of it disappeared as quickly as it came, but there were some people who were able to cash out and keep what they had received.

Attending an IPO ceremony is something like watching professional sports. You aren't on the team, you don't get anything if they win, but you get caught up in the occasion and root for them anyway. It was exciting watching people suddenly get rich, but it was also amazing to see how fast entitlement could set in. I didn't work with many of the infamous "dot-com" companies that tend to attract comparisons to Icarus; the companies I worked with were also in an industry that was subsequently reviled (telecom), but it was an industry where you needed more than a server and a business plan in order to file an S-1. The management team had usually been on board for a respectable period of time, and they had built something tangible.

Nonetheless, it's hard to swallow when somebody is suddenly worth millions and seems to think that it's their right. You could see it in some faces: amazed wonder transitioning swiftly to smug self-satisfaction. Within half an hour of the opening of trading, if you asked them whether or not they deserved such lucre their answer would probably be, "We worked very hard to get here." Not a direct answer, but one that has "yes" hovering implicitly above it. History was forgotten - the fact that they had entered a market that sent just about everything skyward immediately was not a factor. The fact that these conditions constituted an extreme anomaly was never considered. They worked hard, ergo they deserved such enormous, instantaneous wealth.

Maybe that's why I never really felt jealous of them. I worked hard myself and had a ringside seat for the boomiest of boom years; however, those dizzying financial heights were for the companies listed, not those who worked for the market itself. There was a bright side: not being a participant in rocketing valuations meant I also didn't feel I had to lie to myself to justify a windfall. I didn't have to rationalize the fact that others worked as hard or harder and received far, far less. Would I have taken the money if I were one of them? Heck, yes. But I hope I would have had the good sense to realize my good fortune.

Because a winning lottery ticket is just luck, no matter if it comes from Wall Street or the 7-Eleven.

Posted: Friday - April 02, 2004 at 07:56 AM | |