Stocks are just like an accident: Stop, stare

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© St. Petersburg Times
published September 27, 2002

Remember in the old movies when the really, really rich guys had stock market ticker-tape machines in their offices and could run over and check their financial situations any time?

I always thought that was neat.

Now I'm not so sure.

For most of my life the stock market was a complete mystery (as opposed to now when I have it nearly 5 percent figured out.) It was something to which I paid about as much attention as I did to cricket scores or ozone.

My family was too poor to own stocks, or, put another way, my family knew it was too poor to own stocks. I also am too poor but don't have enough sense to know it.

When, 30 years ago, I joined a company with a profit-sharing plan and, later, a 401k plan invested in stocks and bonds, I developed some interest, although I was too lazy to read the annual reports of the stocks the plan owned. So I had only a broad-view snapshot of things every three months when a printed report was sent to my house.

I used to hide it because spouses usually have a survivorship interest in such plans, and I never thought it wise to remind a spouse how much I was worth dead. There were times, in my younger and wilder years, that it wouldn't have taken a lot to make that information more interesting than I wanted it to be.

But as retirement approaches, and as I have a few minuscule individual investments of my own, suddenly the market is of interest to me.

Here lately, make that morbid interest.

We all know how infuriating it is to be held up in traffic on an interstate for a couple of hours only to find that the problem wasn't a physical blockage of the road, but an indulgence of that peculiarly human need to slow down and gaze on gore and disaster.

The causes probably are complex.

Some of us like being reassured that somebody is having a worse day than we are, and that horrible things usually seem to happen to other people. For some of us, the lucky ones, something horrible is unusual enough to pique interest. In war zones I have seen people stepping unconcernedly over bodies as though they were fallen tree limbs.

I think there is some corollary in compulsively checking the market (the Dow, at this second as I write, is down only 65 points, and that, God help us all, is actually an improvement).

The Web site I use offers an added inducement.

Not only can I check the major indexes to see how the nation as a whole is doing, but I can check the stocks I own and see whether I am on or below decks on the bottom-bound Titanic we call an economy.

I think it's supposed to make me feel slightly better if I am going down the toilet more slowly than the rest of you, or more nervous if the reverse is true.

And the old profit sharing fund that I used to look at every three months, I can now visit at another Web site any time I want to, only I don't want to all that often these days.

I'm starting to feel like Henny Youngman did when he said, "I have all the money I need . . . if I die by four o'clock."

The conventional wisdom used to be that war, or rumors of war, were good things for the market. When that meant a lot of gearing up to make trucks and tanks and hand-grenades that might have been true, but the face of war has changed drastically, and so has its impact, despite "smart bombs," that cost between $20,000 and nearly $500,000.

Now the market drops two points every time the president rattles another sabre.

And now that we have made it illegal for corporate executives to lie to us about profits, a major blow to a capitalist economy apparently, all of the resultant semi-truthfulness isn't helping any.

But I keep checking anyhow. I just can't seem to stop myself.

And I got what I deserved.

I went to keep a medical appointment, and when I returned a couple of hours later to wrap this column up, I checked again.

The Dow, at this writing, is now down 191.72.

I guess I forgot.

When the fat cats in those old movies looked at their private tickers, they sometimes shouted for champagne and began celebrating.

Other times, they just jumped out of the window.

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