Millions Trade on Internet While at Work --!!!!>
Some Abandon the Water Cooler for Stock Trading on the Internet
By ROBERT D. HERSHEY Jr. -- May 20, 1999
In Florida, a young dentist tracks stocks between
patients, sometimes even between an X-ray and a
filling. In
Washington State, a freight-company manager logs on to
a financial Web site for four to six hours of his
workday. A designer at a California architectural firm
gets so absorbed in the market that his productivity
falls 25 percent.
The long bull market and cascading advances in
technology have combined to drive capitalism's main
numbers game into the heart of the American workplace,
with millions of wage earners, managers and
entrepreneurs obsessing about Wall Street. Their
obsession, in fact, far eclipses the speculative
1920's, when elevator operators and bootblacks were a
chief source of what passed for information.
"Two years ago I would have never
thought I'd be into doing this," said the
dentist, Norma Victores, 30, of Hialeah,
Fla., who follows the market on the
Internet and has bought part of her
portfolio of 21 stocks and mutual funds
on line. "I used to think it was just for
the big-timers."
While much of the early concern about
workday Internet abuse focused on
pornography, the lure of the stock
market has overtaken it, some
specialists said. The Internet is making a
lot of information available to small
investors that was once accessible only
to professionals.
"That's where employees are really
wasting their time," said Jonathan Penn,
an analyst at Giga Information Group, a
firm that advises companies on
information technology. "I'd definitely
put that first," he added, ahead of
sports, personal E-mail, chat rooms and
pornography.
The flick-of-the-finger ease with which office workers
and others can research, monitor and trade stocks --
often able to return instantly to their assigned tasks
-- is a growing concern for employers.
Most of the people willing to discuss the issue were
self-employed or worked for small companies where
Internet abuses could be dealt with amicably. Larger
corporations, while acknowledging the potential for
abuse, generally denied that employees were using
company time to trade stocks. Some devotees in the
workplace said the activity could be addictive, but
most simply found it a practical method for earning
extra income.
So far, the Government has not been able to measure any
economic effect. Michael Harper, the acting associate
commissioner for productivity and technology at the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, suggested that the time
spent by workers on the stock market was not unlike
water-cooler discussion of football or movies and might
even be a partial substitute for it.
"We don't know whether they would be working or doing
something else" if there was less absorption in the
market, Harper said.
But according to Media Metrix Inc., a New York company
that meters Internet use much the way Nielsen Media
Research does television, 22.8 million Americans used
Web sites on company time in March. Some 8.2 million
people visited Yahoo Finance, CBS Marketwatch, Schwab,
E*Trade and other financial sites at work, up from 6
million just three months earlier, the company said.
About 25 percent of all corporate Internet traffic,
much of it surreptitious, is considered unrelated to
work.
The stock market "is becoming a huge distraction," said
Victor Woodward, a vice president at Content
Technologies, which develops programs to help companies
create and enforce policies for Internet use. He said
corporate demand for help in curbing stock-related Web
use had quadrupled in the last year. And companies face
growing competition for the attention of their
employees: Internet gateways like Yahoo, Go and Excite,
eager to attract advertisers, use their home pages to
tempt Web browsers to check stock quotes.
On-line trades account for as much as 30 percent of all
buying and selling by individual investors, surveys
show.
"I can't imagine that this is not a problem in the
workplace," said Jill Munden, who oversees Silicon
Investor Inc., the biggest financial discussion forum.
She said 50 percent of Silicon Investor site visits,
which averaged 20 minutes each, came during regular
working hours and that "you have to believe most people
don't divulge trades and research to their boss or
co-workers."
The Web site for Charles Schwab, the broker accounting
for more than a quarter of Internet transactions, now
averages 33 million visits a day, up from 24 million in
the fourth quarter of 1998, according to Daniel
Hubbard, a spokesman. And actual transactions, which
take only a couple of minutes, are outnumbered 26 to 1
by typically longer sessions for researching companies
or mutual funds or to review portfolios.
Schwab's busiest periods, Hubbard found, coincide with
the opening and closing hours of the New York Stock
Exchange -- from 9:30 to 11:30 A.M. and 3:30 to 4 P.M.,
which falls during the workday for most people on the
East Coast.
Take the case of Dean Hatfield, 36, the designer, for
whom earning between $5,000 and $15,000 a month from
on-line trading for much of last year began to threaten
his day job.
"Instead of billing, say, 37 hours during the week, as
I should have, I was billing perhaps 28," said
Hatfield, who works at KRJ Design in Burlingame, Calif.
"It became an issue because the revenue just wasn't
coming in." Hatfield's superiors took away his Internet
access, so now if he wants to go on line he must walk
to another terminal, his activities easily visible. He
likens it to "getting your hands caught in the cookie
jar." Now, he says, "I do it on the phone or from home
-- but it's not day trading anymore."
At American Fast Freight, a company in Kent, Wash.,
that bundles shipments into bigger units and then
arranges for overseas transport, the official in charge
of computers, Jeff LePage, is still struggling to find
a way to "put the kibosh" on a manager who is routinely
logged onto a financial site for most of the day.
"I hadn't really focused on
this until it became
chronic," said LePage, who
has noticed a gradual
decline in the unit's
performance for which he
blames the employee, a peer
he is reluctant to confront.
LePage has switched off the
employee's financial site,
but the employee appears to
be logging on to other
people's
computers. "The battle goes on," LePage said.
Then there is John Alexandrou, a 43-year-old salesman
in Foster City, Calif., who said that for the last
three years he has spent 30 minutes to an hour of
working time a day on the market. "The adrenaline of
trading options, that's got me completely hooked,"
Alexandrou said, adding that the fraternity of
on-the-job market devotees is very large, especially in
Silicon Valley. "You're not going to find very many
people in this Valley who are not distracted by the
stock market," he said. He insisted, however, that
despite his on-the-job trading, he never failed to make
his business quotas.
On-the-job Internet stock activity has been a
particularly visible problem in the high-technology
community on the West Coast, where much of employees'
pay is in stock options and it is common for even those
of low rank to have an equity stake.
None of this necessarily means that investors pay less
attention to their jobs. Ross Brown, vice president of
MSI Consulting, a Seattle-based management and
marketing adviser to high-technology companies, says he
often spends less time tending to his portfolio --
worth in the mid-six figures -- than when he used to
phone orders to a broker, a process he said can mean
"you've chewed up an hour of your day."
Still, the market is seen as an increasingly serious
time eater by many employers, who have only recently
begun to monitor Internet activity in earnest. A survey
by the Society for Human Resource Management in
Alexandria, Va., found 76 percent of members not
bothering to monitor activity as recently as 1997.
Moreover, employees seem to have little trouble
avoiding detection from casual observation.
"One second I was in E*Trade," said Hatfield, the
California designer, who for a time was making more
money trading than in salary. "And the next second I
was doing design in Autocad," a tool of his trade.
"I could hide the day trading quite easily," he said.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company |
