Yet more signs of market madness...... Day traders push de-listed International Superconductor up 3,500 percent Monday ... and some make a killing By Christopher Byron

MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR "Feb. 29  On Monday, Wall Street experienced what the writer Norman Mailer would refer to as an existential moment. A defunct penny stock de-listed from the Nasdaq three years earlier  a company with no apparent address, employees or even any business activities  nonetheless soared a vein-popping 3,449 percent in value. The stock skyrocketed in precisely 121 minutes for utterly and incredibly no reason whatsoever." Link To Full Story On MSNBC

-- Zdude (zdude777@hotmail.com), March 01, 2000

Answers

And here I sit with a box of tulip bulbs! 8^)

-- Gypsy (GypsiGold@aol.com), March 01, 2000.

Whatever goes up....

-- No Polly (nopolly@hotmail.com), March 01, 2000.

FORTUNE: Meet the New Market Makers

They're young, they're rich, and they couldn't care less about Graham & Dodd. But they're the ones driving those insane tech stocks, and they're not going away.

By Nelson D. Schwartz

There are about 20 minutes to go before the stock market closes, and I'm standing next to 24-year-old Adam Mesh in the sprawling offices of Tradescape, a Manhattan day-trading firm. "Hey, check out PLUG," Mesh yells out. Overhead, on one of Tradescape's ubiquitous TV monitors, CNBC's Joe Kernen is talking up Plug Power, a fuel-cell company that Mesh and the other twentysomething traders here have never heard of before today.

On his multicolored computer screen, Mesh is watching PLUG, already up $15 to $53, suddenly begin to surge again. He jumps in, buying 500 shares at $55. About a minute later he gets out at $58. But PLUG is still soaring, so Mesh gets back in, this time at $60. I look around at the other traders squeezed shoulder to shoulder in Tradescape's offices, and on every screen the ticker PLUG is flashing, its shares furiously moving higher.

"What the heck is this company?" I ask. "It's PLUG," Mesh says. Yeah, I know that much. But what does it do? "I don't know," Mesh responds, without looking up. "Power, I guess." I decide to let the issue drop, and with PLUG now about to close at $79, the question of what the company does seems pretty irrelevant. In a rapid bout of buying and selling, Mesh trades nearly 10,000 shares of PLUG in the few minutes I stand behind his desk, making $20,000 in the process. It's been a good day for Mesh, but for some traders it's been even better. "I made a honey," one guy calls out, using trader slang for $100,000. "Can you believe this?"

Clad in a scruffy old T-shirt and in desperate need of a shave, Mesh is an unlikely mascot for the new world of Wall Street. But at a time when day traders, Internet message-board prowlers, and plain old folks with Ameritrade accounts are increasingly driving the action, it's Mesh--not Peter Lynch or Warren Buffett--who typifies today's investor. They're the ones who are moving the stocks that you hear about on CNBC and at cocktail parties, those names that jump 20% a day, sometimes 200%...

[snip}

Unlike Adam Mesh, Larry Bowman has no trouble recognizing that the money out there is very real. One of the hottest private money managers around, Bowman runs $4.6 billion from his office in Silicon Valley, much of it from suddenly wealthy executives at high-tech companies just a few miles away. Entry into Bowman Capital's private funds is by invitation only, and with an average annual gain of about 75% over the past five years in his flagship fund, Bowman can afford to be choosy. As he puts it: "Money is not the rare commodity it used to be. Performance is."

Bowman has seen plenty of ups and downs in tech stocks. One of Fidelity's most successful managers in the early 1990s, he's one of those guys who invested in Cisco and Dell back when nobody had heard of them. So it's a little disconcerting when he jumps out of his chair, bounds over to a whiteboard, and starts drawing a house of cards.

"Mortgage companies are treating stock options as down payments for houses," Bowman says, drawing a thick black X through one of his cards. "Law firms are insisting that tech clients pay them with equity, not cash," he says, putting an X through another card. "People are going to get massacred. We're not there, but we're getting closer. It's going to be really terrifying on the way down."

Sitting on Bowman's black leather couch, I feel my panic rising and get a sudden urge to call my broker and scream "SELL!" Before I do that, though, Bowman abruptly drops his talk of the coming apocalypse and starts drawing a long, arching sine curve on his whiteboard. "Look, we're just in the beginning of the tech cycle," he says calmly, as my blood pressure returns to normal. "We'll probably have a crash sometime soon, but over the long term, the opportunities are incredible." In a little less than two minutes, Bowman has gone from prophet of doom to high-tech evangelist. "Wireless communications and the Internet are going to revolutionize the world," Bowman declares, back at the whiteboard and ticking off a dozen more reasons to love tech.

If today's market were a single person, I realize, it would be Larry Bowman. One minute he's like the Nasdaq on a down day, off 150 points, the next thing you know he's bullish again and up 200. No wonder everyone on Wall Street is talking about all the volatility, all the time. If a tech-investing genius like Larry Bowman can't make up his mind, how can the rest of us?

So in the long run, tech's looking very good. Just remember: "In the long run, we shall all be dead." -- John Maynard Keynes

-- DeeEmBee (macbeth1@pacbell.net), March 01, 2000.

Darn tags. Off!

Off, i say!

-- DeeEmBee (macbeth1@pacbell.net), March 01, 2000.

Dee,

Thats a good article from fortune.

Thanks

-- Zdude (zdude777@hotmail.com), March 02, 2000.