I am a parasite. Like the untold thousands of other parasites who fall into the loose category of day trader, I'm playing a game that just happens to involve stocks but exists mainly for its own sake. What I'm doing is hardly new, but the surging popularity of regular folks' trading--marked by the obligatory server meltdowns at almost every online brokerage--has few precedents that would comfort anyone. (Other great years in amateur enthusiasm for the stock market include the precrash years of 1906 and 1928.)

Like my fellow day traders, I'm here as a result of the '90s' unique and self-perpetuating collision of a sustained bull market and an explosion in technological innovation, embodied by the most powerful tool in your arsenal--the Internet. I'm here not because I know or care about the business of business, but because the headlines I can't help seeing on airport newsstands and on CNN have tipped me to the fact that all across the nation, people of limited means and intelligence are getting rich quick by buying and selling companies like Yahoo and eBay and Amazon. Why not me?

I'm playing the market for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks--because that's where the money is. The market is my problem, day in and day out, on a split-second basis. Not the market of stocks, brokers and companies--not Wall Street's market--but the electronic market of day traders. This is the mob of short-attention-span savants who, like me, will risk their life's fortunes for a two-minute gamble on a stock they've never heard of and plan to forget in the next five minutes. This is the market of players who each day surge toward a small, ever shifting set of stocks to create volatility, liquidity and opportunities for quick profit, whereas yesterday there was only mundane and profitless stability. This is the market of opportunists whose moves I'm forced to anticipate at blindingly fast speeds, even as they rush to do the same to me. This is the market of people exactly like me.

Like most of today's digital day traders, I didn't spend 10 years on the floor of the American Stock Exchange. Indeed, I'd never purchased a single stock until a little over a year ago. For the latter half of the '90s, in fact, the NASDAQ represented nothing more to me than an ever upward ticking barometer of lost opportunity. I had co-founded a daily online journal of ad hominem pyrotechnics and vulgarity called Suck.com back in August 1995; we've published each weekday since and have even shown a profit, which is unheard of in the Web-content business. From our earliest dispatches, Suck.com had commented ungenerously on the get-rich-quick theatrics of our Internet-industry peers. Unfortunately, I'd failed to get rich myself--quick or otherwise. Indeed, it often seemed as if I were the only person affiliated with a successful San Francisco start-up who hadn't.

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