[Geege] It takes one nanosecond to sell stock, btfw.

I Find Karma (adam@cs.caltech.edu)
Sat, 8 May 1999 16:24:25 -0700 (PDT)


Geege wrote:
> Oh yawn. Like I haven't read this "news" every day for years.

Geege, you're ahead of the crowd in the running of the bulls. I'm not.
Besides, I never said it was news. But when something's threatening the
fabric of the worldwide economy, it might be worth archiving a rundown
of what current thinking was. Wouldn't you love to have had "mailing
list" archives written by people in September and October of 1929, just
to see what conventional thinking was back then? As it is right now,
all we can go by are the Benjamin Graham books and the New York Times
archives.

Geege:
> Listen up: while you're busy congratulating yourself that you
> recognize speculative bubbles (guess you have a slide rule) I'll
> content myself by making a few bucks with a b in the interim.

Everyone's an opportunist. Everyone thinks they can make money off this
phenomenon. Everyone's out there trading.

The capitalist in me wants to think this is the coolest thing ever.
Capital is now truly frictionless, and can wander to wherever needs
it next.

But there's a problem people don't talk about, and that is that money
has no real place to go, and that's why it gets all this attention
deficit and keeps shifting from place to place. If there was a good
place for money, it wouldn't *have* to be so mobile.

This could very real ramifications for those among us planning on
starting companies any time in the near future.

Geege:
> It takes one nanosecond to sell stock, btfw.

Everybody thinks this. It only takes one meltdown of epic proportions
where NO ONE can get his/her broker on the phone, or login through the
Web, and suddenly huge amounts of money exit the market before the
market-savvy individual investor knows what hit him or her.

Maybe you're right that it will never happen. I don't know.

Geege:
> Go buy a bond,

Caution isn't always a bad thing.

----
adam@cs.caltech.edu

In a moment of reverse ego surfing Khare put up a link back to Cooper's
page to facilitate the further researches of self-referential Net
omphaloskeptics.
-- Keith Dawson