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Strategies & Market Trends : DAYTRADING Fundamentals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: OZ who wrote (7258)	3/11/2000 5:20:00 PM
From: Dan Duchardt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18137

OZ, I would like to hear your opinion on what makes this market different Message 13177540 What is different is access to the market place, both in terms of speed and the number of participants. I don't have any statistics on Mr. Levermore's positions, but I'd dare say that when he was finding those fantastic runners he didn't have the masses dumping their blue chips to jump on the bandwagon with him. Admittedly I'm guessing, but I doubt that on average the market exhibited the combination of volatility and accessibility we have today. Dan

To: OZ who wrote (7258)	3/15/2000 8:38:00 PM
From: aldrums	Respond to of 18137

Wall Street-Same or Different? With this post I will have officially beaten this subject into the ground, but I think many on this thread would like to read the following article posted on Briefing.com two weeks ago. Besides, this is fascinating stuff. Let's hope it doesn't set off the round of nastiness we had before. -ME -Market Outlook- When Santayana uttered his famous dictum about failing to heed the lessons of history, we doubt he had the financial markets uppermost in mind. Yet never have we come across an area of human endeavor where the past is re-enacted so regularly and with such exactitude as in the financial and commodity trading markets. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then we market participants must qualify, every couple of generations or so, as certifiable. It is within this context, then, that we sat straight up upon hearing President Clinton open his State of the Union address. Hogging the credit for our record economic expansion, the president messianically asserted that "truly, we are in a "new economy". We thought for a brief, odd moment that we might be listening to a 1929 recording of President Coolidge. Hadn't he been fond of taking credit for the then record economic expansion, all the while linking it to his favorite economic theme - the "new economy"? Indeed, he had. And "new economy" was used also. Yes, those exact words. In 1929 an awe-inspiring array of new economy industries were held up for investor inspection. Also, widespread application of what were then cutting-edge communications technologies, such as the telephone and the telegraphic "ticker", fostered the first wave of what was to become an ongoing democratization of finance. During this period the "wire-house" retail brokerage firms found their genesis. The new economy stocks of the time had much in common with the new economy stocks of our time. Few had profits, which meant, of course, that they all had a story. RCA, or 'Radio' as it was called, was the biggie. There have been only three auto companies for so long that few remember any of the 400 or so automobile brands of the 1920s. All were considered very chic and ultra high-tech on Wall Street. Then there were the airline companies that traded for hundreds of dollars a share, never mind that few had ever booked a single passenger let alone flown an airplane. The period that is associated most in the popular mythology with booming stocks, '28 and '29, was in fact anything but a booming period for the market. Strip out the new economy stocks of the time and the market was in fact sharply bearish. All during February we of the punditocracy made much about the divergence of the two major stock indexes, while another, ongoing divergence got much less comment. Strip out tech and telecommunications, the new economy stocks of our day, and the great bull market dissapears - poof! Laszlo Birinyi Jr. calculates that just 20 stocks accounted for 93% of last year's 21% rise in the S&P. That's almost a mirror reflection of the '28/'29 market. It's times like this that it pays to remember how most of the great investors got rich. Most, everyone from Baron Rothschild to John Templeton, were contrarians. They made their fortunes by buying when everyone was selling and selling when everyone was buying. As the great Baron said, exhibiting his usual sang-froid as revolution rocked 1840s Europe: "I buy when there is blood in the streets". - Ted Jackson