Short memories and ever hopeful...the Boom is back!
NEW YORK POST
SURGING MARKET SEXY AGAIN
By AMY BALDWIN
July 20, 2003 -- At the gym and in elevators, it's no longer a taboo topic of conversation. On television shows like "Sex and the City," it's once again an acceptable subplot.
It's the stock market.
The market's long dive starting in 2000 made stocks too painful to talk about for a long time. But the move upward in recent months has revived the public's interest in investing and which stocks are hot. While the talk is nothing like the feverish levels of the late 1990s, the stock market is no longer off-limits.
"Everyone is saying, 'Well, it was a pretty good day. Knock on wood,' " said Heather Dell, a sales executive at a Manhattan advertising firm.
When stocks were sprinting to all-time highs, the market "was all anybody talked about. Then, as people got laid off and our investments dwindled, our meetings [with friends] were like psychiatry sessions . . . Then nobody talked about it," said Dell.
But the market is regaining its mass appeal, even figuring prominently in the recent season premiere of the HBO of "Sex and the City."
Titled "To Market, To Market," the show opened with heroine and newspaper columnist Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, ringing the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate her paper's going public (Parker also rang the bell to start an actual NYSE session). Wall Street, featured in the story line of the episode, had one of Carrie's friends buying the newspaper's shares.
While that's fiction, it does mirror the true-life scenario playing out as the market's 2003 rally enters its fifth month.
Online broker Scottrade had its biggest day ever June 6, handling 106,000 trades. For the month of June, Scottrade's daily trading average was about 75,000 transactions, nearly three times the 28,562 of June 2002.
"It is just a huge pickup in demand and a change in psychology that is different than I have seen before. It is just an extreme change in investor psychology," said Rodger Riney, chief executive of Scottrade.
Still, trillions of dollars remain on Wall Street's sidelines, or in other words, in low-yielding money market accounts and certificates of deposit.
"I think they are going to be a little smarter, for a least a little while," said Fred Siegel, author of "Investing for Cowards" and host of the New Orleans financial advice radio show "Talking Money." |
