Electronic discount brokerages offer Web-based stock portfolio management for cut-rate commissions. They're hugely popular for the same reason online porn will bankrupt the red-light districts: they allow you to engage in acts that you'd rather not perform in the company of strangers. When I sat down with my bank rep to discuss mutual funds, my choices were between those that focused on big, well-known corporations and those that focused on small companies with room to grow-- that is, large caps vs. small caps. But with my new, garden-variety discount broker (a misplaced sense of decency compels me to not name it), I could put every cent into dunce caps and nobody would lift an eyebrow.

And so it was that I began my flight from quality, deep into the land of securities that weren't yet on even the most adventurous analysts' recommendation lists. Laughing stocks, if you will. I opened an account in the summer of 1998, wiring in a mid-five-figures sum and quickly buying into the only sector I knew well: the Internet. It was easy. After all, there was nobody to berate me in October when I sank cash into eBay at the brazenly lofty height of $40 a share. (I held on to it until it hit $140.) I didn't have to explain to a phone broker how the hunt-and-pecked ignorance on the Yahoo message boards had led me to believe in November that a money-losing, direct-mail outfit called Creative Computers--which was soon to be spinning off a money-losing online auction site, uBid--might double in price over the course of two weeks. I invested before it did, enjoying massive and utterly unjustified gains. And when I experimented with rapidly moving in and out of stocks, there was no broker-mediated system that would even answer the phone in the time it took me to make a round trip through the market.

That said, my first broker was a nightmare, one that materially affected both the frequency and the volume of profanity in my daily monologue. I was forever being logged off the system--typically the instant before or after I'd made a purchase. Trade confirmation took forever, sometimes all day. In one case, a stock dropped $20 between the time I placed a sell order and the time I received my confirmation. Unbelievably, it executed at almost the high for the day, which meant I'd spent the intervening time cleaning my gun and revising my will for nothing. It took hours to get customer support on the line. Ironically, when I finally decided to pull most of my capital from my account, I discovered that the wire-transfer page was broken, and not temporarily. It took days to get my funds out of the account--but by then I had no regrets. I'd learned what day trading really was, and I knew it wasn't this.

It was time to become a serious day trader. I had two of the three prerequisites: a small brick of cash with which to trade, and bottomless cynicism, which is critical for assessing the folly of one's fellow traders. The tool to put me in business, though--the third prerequisite--was an incredibly wired rig. The more amped the technology on your desktop, the better you're able to know precisely what's happening in the market at any given second.

For starters, I needed the fastest connection to the Net I could afford. Day trading consumes obscene amounts of bandwidth. A 56K modem is perfectly acceptable if you're the kind of person who feels comfortable pedaling a tricycle down an interstate. And ISDN is common among less adventuresome types. But to monitor effectively the real-time performance of dozens of stocks simultaneously, most serious traders opt for cable modems or DSL lines. I chose the latter, lucking into a 5.6-megabit DSL line by virtue of living a mere block from the local switch. Cost? About $150 a month.