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virtually overnight, on the new "dot-com" companies, the likes of which the market had never before seen. |
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Witnessing moves of 30, 40, or 50 or more points up in one day in a single stock simply was mind-blowing to everyone on Wall Street. Growing numbers of investors wanted to mine for gold themselves, as they heard friends and associates boast of their newly earned riches. |
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These volatile stocks are still the day trader's delight. It is not so surprising to learn that up to 80 percent of day trading volume is centered on Internet stocks. The "mo-mo" contingent (momentum traders) couldn't live without them. Interestingly, it is the at-home day trader who most favors these stocks, as many day traders at trading firms tend to be more conservative, favoring "old-tech" stocks like Dell and Cisco. |
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One of the tasks of the online investor is to come to grips withand even try to masterthis interplay of personal fear and greed. Sometimes we may experience them very closely linked, along with their associated thoughts. At other times, sucked into the vortex of one force or the other, we experience them as worlds apart. |
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On the Edge: Fear, Loss, and Identity |
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We usually experience fear more powerfully than we do greed. Fear shakes our financial security and scares the hell out of us. At its most powerful, it even jars our sense of personal security in the world. Here's an example. |
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In the movie, The Game, Michael Douglas plays a merger and acquisitions big shot. He gets caught in what becomes a very real game that tests his survival strength when his wealth, possessions, identity, and normal insulations from the everyday world are suddenly stripped away from him. He wakes up in a trash dumpster in Mexico, battered and disoriented, with no money. |
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He is forced to use his wits to get home to San Francisco when he can no longer rely upon the usual support of others he has come to take for granted in his life of luxury. He feels a primal level of fear that he has not experienced since childhood, when he witnessed his father's suicide by leaping headfirst off a building. |
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He learns he is capable of surviving hardship and physical danger even when he is not insulated by the trappings of wealth. And, as it turns out, the purpose of the game was to teach him exactly this. He realized a perspective that he may not have been able to gain in any other, less radical way. |
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