Mike,
Did you see this article in today's WSJ on the changed zeitgeist? I remember reading about this guy back in the height of the mania; he was poster boy for the mania back in 1999, now he's poster boy for the burst bubble. I really feel for his wife, I get the sense she never quite shared the lunacy ;-)
At Cape Cod Barber Shop,
Slumping Stocks Clip Buzz
By ROBERT TOMSHO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
DENNIS, Mass. -- Having bet his own future on the stock market, William Flynn still keeps the television in his barbershop tuned to business news channels. These days, though, he believes almost nothing of what he hears.
"All they ever say is, 'Buy, buy, buy,' all the way down from $100 a share to bankruptcy," the burly 63-year-old barber said while giving a local teenager a close crop one muggy July afternoon. "Now, they give a stock tip and I stay as far away from it as I can. Nobody trusts anyone any more."
Located in a clapboard building beside a busy state highway in this bustling Cape Cod tourist town, Bill's Barber Shop used to be a place where local businessmen gathered to get an $11 trim and swap tips about hot technology stocks. But with the market in a slump and the corporate world awash in one scandal after another, few among the old crowd have the stomach to talk stocks with Mr. Flynn, whose retirement dreams have been crushed as the market's turmoil has sent his portfolio down 87%.
Given what Mr. Flynn has been through, he rarely gets excited -- and even is a bit cynical -- on rare days when the market goes up sharply, as it did in holiday-shortened trading Friday. "I'm glad the market closed at one o'clock so that it didn't get a chance to drop down to even for the day," he says.
"I feel bad for Bill," says Rick Capobianco, the local Maytag dealer, who has cut back deeply on his own stock purchases and tucked his 16-year-old son's college tuition money safely away in a bank account. "He still has the CNBC on, but we don't sit around and talk about the stocks too much any more."
Mr. Flynn's shop was a far different place when it was first profiled in The Wall Street Journal, in a page one article March 13, 2000, just days after the Nasdaq Stock Market peaked. Back then, it seemed as if no market bet could go south for long, and many friends and customers moved their money based on advice from Mr. Flynn. For his part, the mustachioed barber had visions of becoming a stock-market millionaire and retiring. He almost made it, amassing high-tech stocks that topped out at $834,000 in mid-September 2000.
Even after the high-tech bubble burst, Mr. Flynn continued investing in the market, believing a turnaround just had to be in the wings. But month after month, his hopes were dashed. Amid mounting losses in his portfolio, in February 2001, he had to sell $75,000 of stock to cover a margin call to pay off money he borrowed from his brokerage firm to buy stock, and his portfolio's value sank to about $250,000.
Everything he's done has soured: Not a single of the 20 stocks now in his portfolio is valued at more than he paid for it. He has invested in eight initial public offerings, but five of the related companies have gone bankrupt. Mr. Flynn still owns 5,000 shares of EMC Corp., the data-storage concern that he follows like a religion, but it is trading at around $7, down from well over $100 a share in September 2000.
He has lost money even on nontech stocks in his portfolio, such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Independent Bank Corp. And the only purchase he has made recently -- 300 shares of American Science & Engineering Inc., a maker of X-ray detection equipment for airports, several weeks ago -- already is down 16%.
Bottom line: When Mr. Flynn sat down at his back-office computer last week to check his portfolio, its value had dwindled to $103,000 -- roughly $50,000 less than the barber has invested in the market since 1991. "It means that I'm looking at another 10 years of work instead of being retired," says Mr. Flynn, who lately has been taking longer walks in the evening with his wife, Jean.
"We're going to be working longer, so we have to get ourselves in better shape," adds Mrs. Flynn, a secretary at a local insurance firm who doesn't expect Wall Street to recover within her lifetime.
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