A BID AND A PRAYER
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I often wonder amid the inanity if anyone is really falling for
any of it, or whether each trader is simply entertaining the same
calculated guesswork as me. I think of George Trow, the New
Yorker's cultural commentator, and what he said about the game
show Family Feud nearly two decades ago. Trow pegged the show as
emblematic of the meaninglessness of American culture, epitomized
by the moment in which host Richard Dawson asked the contestants
to "guess what a poll of a hundred people had guessed would be
the height of the average American woman." In other words, the
contestants were guessing what other people were guessing. To
Trow, this signaled something like the end of civilization: "No
reality whatsoever. No fact in sight." He could have been talking
about Fatbrain, one man's end of the world, another's gravy
train.
There are endless losers in this game too, of course. And there
are times when I've counted myself among them. In day-trading
culture, there's a word people use to describe themselves when
all the rules are broken and everything that can go wrong does:
"investor." It's what happens when your stock doesn't go up. When
you don't sell at the first downtick. When the crummy thing goes
down so far--and you hold on to to it for so long--that you're
cursed with the sorry task of deluding yourself into thinking
it's better to wait for a recovery. Congratulations! You're an
investor. Freedom it ain't, but it's still just another word for
nothing left to lose.
I've come close to becoming an investor several times, but none
closer than a recent experience with that database behemoth,
Oracle. For days, ORCL had been my personal primrose path, a
high-purity sine wave oscillating between around $36 and $38, at
which points I'd pick up and unload a thousand shares, on the
dot. I should have known not to push my luck. But at the moment
when it would have helped me most, I failed to take stock of my
personal idiot factor. By my calculations, I'm guaranteed to act
like an idiot slightly more than half of the time--well within
standard industry tolerances but harmful on occasion. That
occasion was a fine day this past March, when I bought 2,000
shares at 36 7/8--minutes before the company announced its
quarterly earnings statement. As it turned out, it was not a good
quarter for ORCL.
I tried to make myself believe ORCL would bounce back the next
morning. But at 6 a.m., half an hour before the market opened,
with recollections of recent free-falling Dell and Compaq shares
running through my naturally caffeinated head--and Oracle at 30
and fading--I decided to not become an investor. I dumped my
shares. It was a choice that cost me almost $10,000. It was the
kind of loss that makes you wonder how many different ways there
are of saying "Never again," and whether you could ever live long
enough to say them all.
