*OT* Stock market gaining new fans
Sunday, May 2, 1999
By MICHAEL MARKOWITZ
Staff Writer
If you looked up at Shea Stadium's main scoreboard after the first inning of Thursday afternoon's Mets game, you found the following: the score (1-0 San Diego), the starting lineups, and the out-of-town scores -- Cubs 1, Florida 0; Arizona 1, Houston 0; Colorado 2, St. Louis 0.
But if you looked at two auxiliary boards down the left- and right-field lines, you found different kinds of scores: American Express, 137, up 3 15/16; Cap One Financial, 171 5/8, up 5 5/8; Phelps Dodge, 69 1/8, up 4.
New to Shea this year, the stock tickers are as sure a sign as any that investing is threatening to overtake baseball and football as America's most popular pastime.
More people than ever are plunging into the markets, tracking and trading stocks and making the kinds of investment decisions that just a few years ago were almost exclusively the province of pinstriped Wall Street bankers and other well-heeled professionals.
As a result, the stock market seems to be everywhere these days, enmeshed in the landscape and intertwined with everyday life to a greater extent than at any time since the 1920s, experts say.
And in the Twenties, they didn't have CNBC.
Look around. Chances are good that the television in your local gym, bar, doctor's office, or diner is now tuned to one of several all-business stations instead of to general news, sports, or MTV.
TV screens and electronic zippers in airports and train stations now help travelers keep abreast of the markets as they rush from place to place. Some airplane cell phones display live stock quotes on the handsets mounted into the backs of seats.
Financial publications, with covers proclaiming sure-fire ways to pick winning stocks and mutual funds, are proliferating. Investment-related sites are among the most popular on the Internet, alongside pornography and sports.
Eugene White, a professor of economics at Rutgers University, said that an explosion in mass media combined with a major change in the way Americans save for retirement is producing a buzz about stocks and investing that makes the current bull market unlike any other.
For proof of how democratized the market has become, think of the widespread attention paid to the Dow's recent assault on 10,000.
"There's been a basic shift in the way people save for pensions," White said, explaining why people who ignored the stock market's big run-up of the 1980s are watching its every move in the late 1990s.
According to the Federal Reserve Board, close to 50 percent of U.S. households have some kind of stake in the equity markets, either through direct ownership of stocks or through mutual funds or 401(k) retirement plans. A decade ago, less than a third of households had exposure to the markets.
"Because of the switch to 401(k) plans and away from employer pension plans, people have to pay closer attention to financial issues," White said. "Also, we've had a long period of expansion that's led to a lot of people feeling very positive. There's more general interest in the market because there seem to be so many opportunities."
CNBC, the Fort Lee-based financial news cable channel, says its viewership has roughly doubled in the past four years, with almost 300,000 households now tuning in. Thousands of additional people watch the station at locations away from their homes.
The station and its competitors, such as CNNfn, didn't even exist during the bull market of the 1980s. Now, its commentators and guests are minor celebrities.
On days when Wall Street makes major news, viewership skyrockets. Last Aug. 31, when the Dow fell 512 points, 436,000 households tuned into CNBC, a spokeswoman said.
Jerry Stilianessi, owner of the King George Diner on Hamburg Turnpike in Wayne, said he started showing financial TV in his restaurant instead of news last year because his customers demanded it.
"At lunchtime, they like to watch the stock market and investing instead of news. It's what everyone talks about," Stilianessi said. "I think 30 to 40 percent of my customers want to see the stocks all the time."
Stilianessi says he, too, has become a stock-watcher, glancing at the TV occasionally during the day and keeping closer tabs on the market in his spare time.
As he sat at the bar at Houston's restaurant in Hackensack's Riverside Square Mall one day last week, Stephen Bolen, a computer technician, kept shifting his eyes away from his friend and looking up at the TV, which was tuned to CNBC.
"I can't get enough. It really becomes a 24-hour thing," said Bolen, 44, of Fairfield. Bolen said he and his co-workers often keep a computer logged onto a financial Web site so they can check stock quotes during the day.
If there's a downside to Americans' growing fascination with stocks, David Levine has seen it.
Levine, senior adviser to the director of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, said there has been a shift in the kinds of insider trading cases the agency prosecutes.
Once, its targets were investment bankers and arbitrageurs -- the Michael Milkens of the world. Now, they are more likely to be accountants and secretaries, low-level people who couldn't resist passing an insider tidbit to a relative or pal.
"Clearly, in the '80s, the biggest problem with insider trading was taking place in the heart of Wall Street," Levine said. "In the '90s, the action has started to shift, as the media likes to say, from Wall Street to Main Street."
What has happened, Levine said, is that a new generation of investors has come along that hasn't had the sobering experience of watching a Wall Street big shot led away in handcuffs.
"These people have not fully digested the lessons that investment bankers digested in the 1980s," Levine said.
For most people, though, the market seems to have become a harmless part of the background.
Sitting behind home plate at Shea on Thursday, Charlotte Reed, a fan visiting from San Diego, said she thought the new stock-quote scoreboards were a "cute" addition.
Reuters provides the data for the boards, which are wedged between ads for Reuters, Waterhouse Securities, and other financial services.
"[New York] is supposed to be the financial capital, so I guess it's only appropriate," Reed said.
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