We Had Good Times

Back in 1996-2000, “The Fly” was quite the prolific internet stock investor. I was buying dot coms before any of my friends. Granted, I had little to no money and my ideas weren’t worth as much back then as they are now. But I knew the internet would represent something special, which is why I took my entire life savings at the time ($6,000) and bought AMER (if you don’t know what company that ticker represents, leave the site now). In less than 4 years, my 6k turned into 250k and I actually sold.

During the Asian crisis of ’97 and LTCM shit in ’98, I built my business from the ground up on stocks like SEEK, GCTY, ATHM and BYND. Actually, come to think about it, there was a point when my entire book was in BYND, albeit a very small book at that. I remember watching the markets decline, in horror, as my entire livelihood was invested in one stupid stock. I was leveraged to the hilt and accounts were getting pinged for margin liquidation. My timing could not have been better, as the market bottomed the fuck out and went straight up to Nasdaq 5,000. I had accounts that were 10% equity, at 4k, go to $200k inside of a year. For those of you who did not trade the dot com bubble, you missed out on the best market of all time.

I was so young, making so much money, literally, I did not know what to do with it. From the second I stepped into the office, I was busy writing tickets (back then, trades had to be done via ticket and walked over to the trading desk) There was no such thing as lunch and I didn’t go home until 11pm, every single night.

But then all that shit changed, when the markets crashed in 2000, utterly destroying  jerk offs like me ad hoc. I remember wiping out my entire personal trading account, inside of a few short weeks in May of 2000, just in time for my birthday. My wife and I were planning to buy a great big house and she had no idea what the fuck I was up to at work. Needless to say, we didn’t buy that great big house, as I descended into “broker poverty” and depression for the remainder of 2000-2001. From 2001-2003, I dedicated my career towards building assets, safely, which entailed fixed income and little to none equity investments. I was baptized through fire and didn’t want to be cold calling at 40. Literally, back then, a big win was 10%. Equities were to be shorted, never bought. There were some winners. However, they were hard to find, sifting through the Bloomberg terminal. Believe me, if I had access to The PPT back then, life would be exponentially easier.

In early 2003, I sensed a shift in sentiment. I remember the day when I decided to sell all of my fixed income and buy stocks. I specialized in semiconductors, being an avid reader of EETimes, The Gilder Report, Digi Times etc. That market was just as good as 2009 and it put me back on the map. I had a brief hiccup in early 2004, during the great semiconductor shake out in January of that year. But, for the most part, its been easy peasy since then. We had the crash in 2008 and that turned out well, for me at least. We are now almost 4 years removed from the greatest credit bubble in the history of mankind, yet the economy is still teetering.

Back in 2000, in the midst of the melt down, my friends Father told me “you’re fucked. This market will not get back to Nasdaq 5,000 for another 15 years.” I thought he was fucking nuts. However, here we are, 11 years later, and we are nowhere close to Nasdaq 5,000. Back then I was too stubborn and full of hubris to heed his dire warnings. I viewed him as an older guy, disconnected from the “new economy.” Little did I know, there is no such thing as a “new economy” or old. It’s the same shit, evolving over time, raping people along the way.

This market cannot be sustained at these levels, unless we get some more crack. We need that jumbo, in order to get high and bank coin in stocks. Dr. Bernanake, as the Big Headed man in the Bow Tie likes to call him, needs to consider QE3, else we will descend into the deflationary vortex, for the 5th time over the past 14 years.

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