Byrne: Nicholas Birbas was a 24-year old waiter, wiping tables Manhattan, when he borrowed $3000 and launched himself onto the stock market. He had no experience, no help and no broker. Just a lone computer and iron nerves. Now 25, Nick has his own apartment block and, of course, the shiny new Corvette.
Nick: I started out with 3,000 and currently I’m up to 500,000.
Byrne: Is this your version of the American Dream?
Nick: All my friends tell me so, so I would say yes.
Music
Byrne: A turbo-charged economy. A raging bull-market. And forecasts of more blue sky ahead. The good times are rolling in America and leading the charge – as ever – New York.
FX: Ship horn
Byrne: The red-hot heart of American capitalism, where they’re all talking about a new industrial revolution, driven by technology in general, and the internet in particular.
FX: SirenMusic
Byrne: Like the steam engine which sparked the industrial revolution of the late 1700s, the Internet is changing everything it touches - and at the cutting edge of the revolution, is Wall Street.No one’s absolutely sure where it’s all headed, but they all want a ticket on the ride.
From the working traders…Steve: When you’re on top of that wave, and you’re surfing, you got to ride it to the end. And that’s what you’re on right now.
Byrne: To the new breed of cyber millionaires…Steph: It’s just that you are shaping a completely new universe that’s probably one of the biggest socio-economic changes that’s ever hit the planet.
Byrne: And the most respected economists.Yardeni: If you don’t get on this technology boom, if you don’t compete, if you just kind of look around and resent that you’re falling behind, you’re going to just be left in the dust, you’re going to miss the whole thing.
Byrne: Scott Friedman is at the vanguard of the new revolution.
Friedman is a day trader - the purest form of stock trader in the world. He’s also a millionaire at the age of 27.
From a converted office in a Park Avenue skyscraper, Scott and a hundred and fifty other day traders rent the latest digital technology to by-pass traditional stock brokers, and trade directly on the markets. They feed off the volatility of high-technology stocks, traded not on the Big Board - the New York Stock Exchange - but on the younger, nimbler exchange, called the NASDAQ.
Speed is everything. Scott holds his stock for, on average, four and a half minutes. Today he has 120 thousand dollars in play. And it doesn’t take him long to turn a profit.
Scott: I bought a thousand shares at 1109 at 27 and an eighth…
Byrne: Scott Friedman has the advantage of the newest, fastest technology. But he’s not alone. Around the country, eight and a half million people are using their computers to play the market.
Scott: I sold another three hundred at 3/4s…
Byrne: The trend is sending an already booming market through the roof.Scott: So I’ve made money on the trade.
Byrne: This is the NASDAQ, the place where the high technology stocks, the drivers of this revolution are bought and sold. And it’s a pretty bizarre place. As you can see there are no slips of paper, no noisy traders. In fact the only signs of all the frenzied activity going on are these blinking, silent electronic screens which register the trades occurring somewhere out there in cyberspace. But there are an awful lot of them. On average 40 billion dollars a day, making the NASDAQ in value and volume of shares traded the world’s largest stock exchange in the world.
Scott: It’s being my own boss, it’s living the American dream. I make my own decisions, I trade my own money. It’s up to me.
Byrne: Contrast, the old way of doing business, on the New York Stock Exchange.
FX: Floor of exchange hubbub
Byrne: For more than two centuries, America’s mightiest companies -- GM, Coke, Boeing -- have listed on the Big Board. Its stock value today is $12 trillion - though, interestingly, the leaders of the new Industrial Revolution, the high-tech giants like Microsoft and Intel, are not on the client list. They prefer NASDAQ.
Easing the sting of competition is the Big Board’s own spectacular performance. Its key indicator, the Dow Jones index, seems to have shrugged off gravity.Yardeni: In the US it’s been mostly straight up.
You know it was about 20 years ago, it was the ‘60s really, that we just seemed to be stuck at a thousand or below a thousand on the Dow in the seventies. And then the great bull market started in the early eighties and it really got going in the early nineties. I don’t think the market’s going to go back down to a thousand, two thousand. Could it see 7,000 on the Dow, now that we’re almost at 11,000? Yeah it could. But then it will probably see 15,000 by 2005.Byrne: 15,000 by 2005? Yardeni: Yeah.
Byrne: Another 50 per cent gain?Yardeni: Yeah, another 50 percent gain I think, because t is actually a very her conservative forecast. I think we are in a great bull industrial revolution for the global economy and a great bull market in stocks.
Kevin: Stevie, Bank of New York, bought 150 three and a quarter…Steve: That gets him half way home, if Goldman Sachs turns up as an order….
Byrne: And this is one of the biggest bull pits – the trading room of Deutsche Bank.
Steve: Kevin below 5 Goldman- Sachs I could use in a good size… Byrne: Steve Curtis has been trading for 20 years, offering his institutional clients the traditional, full-price, knobs-on service. Buyer to broker.
Steve: … rocking and rolling today Sammy. Yeah, much, much better. It’s the time-honoured way. And each day millions of dollars pass through Steve’s hands on its way to the floor of the N.Y. Exchange.
Byrne: The buy order goes to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. It’s the time honoured way. But times change, and competition with the on-line traders is becoming intense.
A titan like Merrill Lynch -- which until recently sneered at the on-line trend as a flash-in-the-pan -- has already buckled. Deutsche plans to introduce its own on-line arm soon for individual traders. But like many other big players, they aren’t thrilled about the change.
Scott: There is no reason for a traditional broker, not with today’s technology.
Steve: I would say for first time traders it is a rude awakening when you’re buying something and it goes up every day and all of a sudden you start losing real money.
Scott: Just because the last 5 years have been up, it hasn’t been every day the same. You know, the market goes up. You buy, you hold, you sell. Every day is different and we have to adapt to it.
Byrne: But will they adapt? Accustomed to a rising market, will these talented amateurs know what to do when the market turns down?Such is the intoxication of this current boom, the very idea is quickly dismissed.
Richard: I’m not normally described as perverse. But you’ve got to be perverse to say the market is going to crash. It may correct, it may have a major correction. But with low inflation, low unemployment, low interest rates, strong corporate earnings, I would be a certifiable lunatic if I said the market was going to crash.
Music
Byrne: You could well call Richard Quest eccentric, but no one would ever accuse Richard Quest of being certifiable. Over the last decade the BBC’s US business reporter has covered the stock market crash of ’87, the jailing of Ivan Boesky, and the spectacular end to such former Masters of the Universe as junk bond King, Michael Millken.
And now, from his perch high above Manhattan, Quest watches the new era.
Richard: What you’ve got now is this money machine, the Internet, the information technology revolution -- it’s a hell of a mouthful to say, but it is a very profitable mouthful worth saying. The money is flooding out of Wall Street like the dam has burst. It’s going into every nook and cranny, every avenue and street, every restaurant, every clothing story, every apartment hunting building, every limousine company
This is not a fad, this is a revolution under way that’s affecting the way we do business and live our lives, and that’s why it is so profitable.
Byrne: This is the heart of cyber kings territory – narrow, dark buildings with billion dollar brains inside. It’s not that far – just ten blocks or so – to Wall Street, and all the billion dollar baloney of the eighties. But things now, here, are very different.
Music
Byrne: In the revolution under way, these are among its very casual leaders and this its rather grotty headquarters.Todd Krizelman and Stephan Paternot are the co-Chief Executive Officers of theglobe.com, an Internet site which takes the familiar notion of a town hall meeting, bringing together people of similar tastes and interests, and thrusts it into the cyber age. And the whole world can attend. A simple idea? Wall Street thought it might be the next Microsoft and invested big.
Byrne: When theglobe.com went public late last year, it was the biggest initial public offering, or IPO, in history.
Steph: The day of the IPO people said you are, literally, you guys are now worth 97 million dollars each.Byrne: And how strange was it to find yourselves overnight millionaires.
Todd: You’re excited and then you realise you’re not overnight anything. What you are is you have a lot of stock which has a certain worth at that moment. I mean literally in the last nine months since we’ve gone public, Steph and I have seen the stock prices high as roughly 48, 49 dollars a share. And I’ve also seen it as low as 12 dollars a share. Steph: As of right now, we’re worth 30 something million each. And you start to realise that you know, your net worth is going to fluctuate entirely unless you sell it.
Byrne: In just over five years Todd and Steph had gone from their dorm rooms at Cornell to being the toast of the town.
And paying respect are some of the town’s financial stalwarts – among them, chief economist Brian Fabbri, fund manager Barry Hyman, and market analyst Larry Wachtel.They just love theglobe.com boys. And are helping to build their legend.
Wachtel: One of the fellows, of these young fellows, they just brought the company public. It was worth a billion dollars capital… We called the firm asking for Todd and a woman answered. And it turned out to be Todd’s mother. And Todd’s mother said, ‘Todd, someone on the phone for you.’ Like you called a home.
Hyman: To begin with they’re technological geniuses in those cases, but they’ve grown up in an atmosphere of g computer professionals, or computer majors at college, who are really regarded as nerds, computer nerds.
Byrne: In your opinion, do they deserve to get this rich, this quickly?
Fabbri: No, I don’t think there’s a question of deserving. These people have invented a new product, and a new science and a new way of life really.
Byrne: Isn’t this in a way, it’s the classic American thing, get rich quick.
Hyman: Well, separate out what the market says that they’re worth and what the reality of their businesses are. These people who are creating these internet sites and creating the internet revolution, they’re really artists. They are creators, they are really – they’re not scientists, they’re artists.
Fabbri: They’re the inventors of the day, and they’re being paid accordingly.
Steph: This is affecting hundreds of millions of people already. This is going to affect billions of people. It is changing economics
Byrne: So, given all this, are you the new masters of the universe?
Steph: I wouldn’t say we’re the new masters of the universe at all. I mean this is, you know, obviously beyond a flash in the pan. I think that what we provide, we’re going to be one of those people at some point over the evolution of the planet that had some impact in shaping it. That’s exciting in itself. I don’t think if anyway that anyone is becoming a master…. This is almost like letting the people of the planet know that they are now the masters of the universe, and for the first time they can realise it and try it.
Music
Richard: Look at those bags under my eyes. Almost need shoes to match.Richard: To the New York market.
It was a very quiet end to the week, and perhaps the sort of quiet end we’re seeing quite a lot of, where in the summer people want to get out off to their weekend homes in the Hamptons, Long Island.
Byrne: Markets rise and markets fall. Internet companies soar like comets across the sky – and some WILL burn out. But the trend, Richard Quest believes, is long, strong – and extremely broad.
Richard: There has been the most extraordinary amount of wealth creation. And we’re not just talking about the few people at the top who’ve got mega bucks, struck it rich and have taken it all to the bank. You’re talking about a deepening of wealth across the board. What we’ve got here is a broad based wealth creation machine. And that’s what it is. This is a money machine. It’s printing it like there is no tomorrow.
Steph: We’ve come up with a model, for instance, where we’re saying literally the same thing, except we’re going to pay ten cents rather as opposed to 50. So we would be doing the same thing…
Byrne: A bit for everyone – and a lot for a few. It’s still capitalism, and they still talk the business talk. But unrestrained greed isn’t quite so good as it was in the 80s – and these young entrepreneurs are a very different breed.
Todd: …they have 150 employees at one point. And if they don’t work it out, they just simply go out of business in a year.
Boat driver: Okay, hold on, here we go!Music
Playtime for the children of the high-tech revolution – or as they’re sometimes called, the dot filthy rich.
Scott Friedman looks the part – but like most of these rich young tech-heads, he’s not actually spending up big.The boat’s borrowed. He and his wife, Alison, haven’t even bought a new home – yet.
Scott: Well I think there’s a big difference between the guys of today and the guys of the ‘80s. In the ‘80s it was sort of an elite club that if you were fortunate to be a member of you were first of all trading the firm’s money, and using other people’s money to get your own wealth. Whereas today it is up to me.
And I just want to have a steady growth path. I mean again, I’m conservative and I just want to keep it growing. I look at this as a profession, not as a get rich quick scheme.
Byrne: And the Globe CEOs are the same.
Todd: For instance Steph and I still live in the same apartments we’ve lived in for the last two years, since pre-IPO, we don’t have cars. We have huge planes (laughs)… just kidding Byrne: And you spend a lot on clothes I guess. Todd: Yeah you can tell.
Richard: They’re not ostentatious, they’re not rambunctious, they are not lively individuals. Look, just look at their leaders, just look at their mentors, look at their heroes (together with Byrne)… Bill Gates!!!
Byrne: Having dived into the money pool at the deep end, it’s now a matter of swimming like crazy.theglobe.com still hasn’t turned a profit, and that’s typical. To buy dot com is to invest in the future.
Byrne: Most Internet companies will fail. A very few will succeed spectacularly. It’s the gamblers’ – sorry, traders’ – job to pick the winners, and avoid the splat of a bursting bubble.
Steph: While you’re doing laps, I’m sitting there like watching the drip of the, the grease drip off the burger… One of us ain’t going to make it.
Byrne: : Is there a bubble going on in Internet stocks? Steph: I don’t describe it as a bubble. There’s a phenomena with Internet stocks versus all other stocks. That’s been going on since the internet started. That phenomenon continues. As long as people are inspired and think the Internet is huge and different the valuations will continue to be huge and different.
Todd: It’s no different than when the cable industry started, it’s no different from when the first television network started in the early 1900s. The reality is, any time you have a new set of companies, that can capture the potential for a massive audience, they’re going to see those high valuations. Valuations because they can have access to all these users.
Wachtel: Old timers like us wait for the day of reckoning. Wait for the day when these people who are speculating to be smacked down. Everybody’s invested, everybody’s happy, everybody’s making money… ah, something’s wrong here,
Yardeni: Hopefully there is no end. I mean there is always an end to our individual lives, but I think the Internet technologies, the technology revolution has already created a tremendous amount of prosperity for us worldwide. I think that is going to continue. There is no reason why we couldn’t extrapolate that to the moon at this point.
Traffic/music
Byrne: In New York they’re partying as if the good times are here to stay . But then the inhabitants of the financial capital of the world have always been extremely confident. Just as they’ve been before every big stock market crash in history.
Perhaps they’re right and this time, it is different. However it turns out, at the very end of a tumultuous century, it does seem appropriate that a new technology, and a new generation, are now leading the band.
Nick: I started out with 3,000 and currently I’m up to 500,000.
Byrne: Is this your version of the American Dream?
Nick: All my friends tell me so, so I would say yes.
Music
Byrne: A turbo-charged economy. A raging bull-market. And forecasts of more blue sky ahead. The good times are rolling in America and leading the charge – as ever – New York.
FX: Ship horn
Byrne: The red-hot heart of American capitalism, where they’re all talking about a new industrial revolution, driven by technology in general, and the internet in particular.
FX: SirenMusic
Byrne: Like the steam engine which sparked the industrial revolution of the late 1700s, the Internet is changing everything it touches - and at the cutting edge of the revolution, is Wall Street.No one’s absolutely sure where it’s all headed, but they all want a ticket on the ride.
From the working traders…Steve: When you’re on top of that wave, and you’re surfing, you got to ride it to the end. And that’s what you’re on right now.
Byrne: To the new breed of cyber millionaires…Steph: It’s just that you are shaping a completely new universe that’s probably one of the biggest socio-economic changes that’s ever hit the planet.
Byrne: And the most respected economists.Yardeni: If you don’t get on this technology boom, if you don’t compete, if you just kind of look around and resent that you’re falling behind, you’re going to just be left in the dust, you’re going to miss the whole thing.
Byrne: Scott Friedman is at the vanguard of the new revolution.
Friedman is a day trader - the purest form of stock trader in the world. He’s also a millionaire at the age of 27.
From a converted office in a Park Avenue skyscraper, Scott and a hundred and fifty other day traders rent the latest digital technology to by-pass traditional stock brokers, and trade directly on the markets. They feed off the volatility of high-technology stocks, traded not on the Big Board - the New York Stock Exchange - but on the younger, nimbler exchange, called the NASDAQ.
Speed is everything. Scott holds his stock for, on average, four and a half minutes. Today he has 120 thousand dollars in play. And it doesn’t take him long to turn a profit.
Scott: I bought a thousand shares at 1109 at 27 and an eighth…
Byrne: Scott Friedman has the advantage of the newest, fastest technology. But he’s not alone. Around the country, eight and a half million people are using their computers to play the market.
Scott: I sold another three hundred at 3/4s…
Byrne: The trend is sending an already booming market through the roof.Scott: So I’ve made money on the trade.
Byrne: This is the NASDAQ, the place where the high technology stocks, the drivers of this revolution are bought and sold. And it’s a pretty bizarre place. As you can see there are no slips of paper, no noisy traders. In fact the only signs of all the frenzied activity going on are these blinking, silent electronic screens which register the trades occurring somewhere out there in cyberspace. But there are an awful lot of them. On average 40 billion dollars a day, making the NASDAQ in value and volume of shares traded the world’s largest stock exchange in the world.
Scott: It’s being my own boss, it’s living the American dream. I make my own decisions, I trade my own money. It’s up to me.
Byrne: Contrast, the old way of doing business, on the New York Stock Exchange.
FX: Floor of exchange hubbub
Byrne: For more than two centuries, America’s mightiest companies -- GM, Coke, Boeing -- have listed on the Big Board. Its stock value today is $12 trillion - though, interestingly, the leaders of the new Industrial Revolution, the high-tech giants like Microsoft and Intel, are not on the client list. They prefer NASDAQ.
Easing the sting of competition is the Big Board’s own spectacular performance. Its key indicator, the Dow Jones index, seems to have shrugged off gravity.Yardeni: In the US it’s been mostly straight up.
You know it was about 20 years ago, it was the ‘60s really, that we just seemed to be stuck at a thousand or below a thousand on the Dow in the seventies. And then the great bull market started in the early eighties and it really got going in the early nineties. I don’t think the market’s going to go back down to a thousand, two thousand. Could it see 7,000 on the Dow, now that we’re almost at 11,000? Yeah it could. But then it will probably see 15,000 by 2005.Byrne: 15,000 by 2005? Yardeni: Yeah.
Byrne: Another 50 per cent gain?Yardeni: Yeah, another 50 percent gain I think, because t is actually a very her conservative forecast. I think we are in a great bull industrial revolution for the global economy and a great bull market in stocks.
Kevin: Stevie, Bank of New York, bought 150 three and a quarter…Steve: That gets him half way home, if Goldman Sachs turns up as an order….
Byrne: And this is one of the biggest bull pits – the trading room of Deutsche Bank.
Steve: Kevin below 5 Goldman- Sachs I could use in a good size… Byrne: Steve Curtis has been trading for 20 years, offering his institutional clients the traditional, full-price, knobs-on service. Buyer to broker.
Steve: … rocking and rolling today Sammy. Yeah, much, much better. It’s the time-honoured way. And each day millions of dollars pass through Steve’s hands on its way to the floor of the N.Y. Exchange.
Byrne: The buy order goes to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. It’s the time honoured way. But times change, and competition with the on-line traders is becoming intense.
A titan like Merrill Lynch -- which until recently sneered at the on-line trend as a flash-in-the-pan -- has already buckled. Deutsche plans to introduce its own on-line arm soon for individual traders. But like many other big players, they aren’t thrilled about the change.
Scott: There is no reason for a traditional broker, not with today’s technology.
Steve: I would say for first time traders it is a rude awakening when you’re buying something and it goes up every day and all of a sudden you start losing real money.
Scott: Just because the last 5 years have been up, it hasn’t been every day the same. You know, the market goes up. You buy, you hold, you sell. Every day is different and we have to adapt to it.
Byrne: But will they adapt? Accustomed to a rising market, will these talented amateurs know what to do when the market turns down?Such is the intoxication of this current boom, the very idea is quickly dismissed.
Richard: I’m not normally described as perverse. But you’ve got to be perverse to say the market is going to crash. It may correct, it may have a major correction. But with low inflation, low unemployment, low interest rates, strong corporate earnings, I would be a certifiable lunatic if I said the market was going to crash.
Music
Byrne: You could well call Richard Quest eccentric, but no one would ever accuse Richard Quest of being certifiable. Over the last decade the BBC’s US business reporter has covered the stock market crash of ’87, the jailing of Ivan Boesky, and the spectacular end to such former Masters of the Universe as junk bond King, Michael Millken.
And now, from his perch high above Manhattan, Quest watches the new era.
Richard: What you’ve got now is this money machine, the Internet, the information technology revolution -- it’s a hell of a mouthful to say, but it is a very profitable mouthful worth saying. The money is flooding out of Wall Street like the dam has burst. It’s going into every nook and cranny, every avenue and street, every restaurant, every clothing story, every apartment hunting building, every limousine company
This is not a fad, this is a revolution under way that’s affecting the way we do business and live our lives, and that’s why it is so profitable.
Byrne: This is the heart of cyber kings territory – narrow, dark buildings with billion dollar brains inside. It’s not that far – just ten blocks or so – to Wall Street, and all the billion dollar baloney of the eighties. But things now, here, are very different.
Music
Byrne: In the revolution under way, these are among its very casual leaders and this its rather grotty headquarters.Todd Krizelman and Stephan Paternot are the co-Chief Executive Officers of theglobe.com, an Internet site which takes the familiar notion of a town hall meeting, bringing together people of similar tastes and interests, and thrusts it into the cyber age. And the whole world can attend. A simple idea? Wall Street thought it might be the next Microsoft and invested big.
Byrne: When theglobe.com went public late last year, it was the biggest initial public offering, or IPO, in history.
Steph: The day of the IPO people said you are, literally, you guys are now worth 97 million dollars each.Byrne: And how strange was it to find yourselves overnight millionaires.
Todd: You’re excited and then you realise you’re not overnight anything. What you are is you have a lot of stock which has a certain worth at that moment. I mean literally in the last nine months since we’ve gone public, Steph and I have seen the stock prices high as roughly 48, 49 dollars a share. And I’ve also seen it as low as 12 dollars a share. Steph: As of right now, we’re worth 30 something million each. And you start to realise that you know, your net worth is going to fluctuate entirely unless you sell it.
Byrne: In just over five years Todd and Steph had gone from their dorm rooms at Cornell to being the toast of the town.
And paying respect are some of the town’s financial stalwarts – among them, chief economist Brian Fabbri, fund manager Barry Hyman, and market analyst Larry Wachtel.They just love theglobe.com boys. And are helping to build their legend.
Wachtel: One of the fellows, of these young fellows, they just brought the company public. It was worth a billion dollars capital… We called the firm asking for Todd and a woman answered. And it turned out to be Todd’s mother. And Todd’s mother said, ‘Todd, someone on the phone for you.’ Like you called a home.
Hyman: To begin with they’re technological geniuses in those cases, but they’ve grown up in an atmosphere of g computer professionals, or computer majors at college, who are really regarded as nerds, computer nerds.
Byrne: In your opinion, do they deserve to get this rich, this quickly?
Fabbri: No, I don’t think there’s a question of deserving. These people have invented a new product, and a new science and a new way of life really.
Byrne: Isn’t this in a way, it’s the classic American thing, get rich quick.
Hyman: Well, separate out what the market says that they’re worth and what the reality of their businesses are. These people who are creating these internet sites and creating the internet revolution, they’re really artists. They are creators, they are really – they’re not scientists, they’re artists.
Fabbri: They’re the inventors of the day, and they’re being paid accordingly.
Steph: This is affecting hundreds of millions of people already. This is going to affect billions of people. It is changing economics
Byrne: So, given all this, are you the new masters of the universe?
Steph: I wouldn’t say we’re the new masters of the universe at all. I mean this is, you know, obviously beyond a flash in the pan. I think that what we provide, we’re going to be one of those people at some point over the evolution of the planet that had some impact in shaping it. That’s exciting in itself. I don’t think if anyway that anyone is becoming a master…. This is almost like letting the people of the planet know that they are now the masters of the universe, and for the first time they can realise it and try it.
Music
Richard: Look at those bags under my eyes. Almost need shoes to match.Richard: To the New York market.
It was a very quiet end to the week, and perhaps the sort of quiet end we’re seeing quite a lot of, where in the summer people want to get out off to their weekend homes in the Hamptons, Long Island.
Byrne: Markets rise and markets fall. Internet companies soar like comets across the sky – and some WILL burn out. But the trend, Richard Quest believes, is long, strong – and extremely broad.
Richard: There has been the most extraordinary amount of wealth creation. And we’re not just talking about the few people at the top who’ve got mega bucks, struck it rich and have taken it all to the bank. You’re talking about a deepening of wealth across the board. What we’ve got here is a broad based wealth creation machine. And that’s what it is. This is a money machine. It’s printing it like there is no tomorrow.
Steph: We’ve come up with a model, for instance, where we’re saying literally the same thing, except we’re going to pay ten cents rather as opposed to 50. So we would be doing the same thing…
Byrne: A bit for everyone – and a lot for a few. It’s still capitalism, and they still talk the business talk. But unrestrained greed isn’t quite so good as it was in the 80s – and these young entrepreneurs are a very different breed.
Todd: …they have 150 employees at one point. And if they don’t work it out, they just simply go out of business in a year.
Boat driver: Okay, hold on, here we go!Music
Playtime for the children of the high-tech revolution – or as they’re sometimes called, the dot filthy rich.
Scott Friedman looks the part – but like most of these rich young tech-heads, he’s not actually spending up big.The boat’s borrowed. He and his wife, Alison, haven’t even bought a new home – yet.
Scott: Well I think there’s a big difference between the guys of today and the guys of the ‘80s. In the ‘80s it was sort of an elite club that if you were fortunate to be a member of you were first of all trading the firm’s money, and using other people’s money to get your own wealth. Whereas today it is up to me.
And I just want to have a steady growth path. I mean again, I’m conservative and I just want to keep it growing. I look at this as a profession, not as a get rich quick scheme.
Byrne: And the Globe CEOs are the same.
Todd: For instance Steph and I still live in the same apartments we’ve lived in for the last two years, since pre-IPO, we don’t have cars. We have huge planes (laughs)… just kidding Byrne: And you spend a lot on clothes I guess. Todd: Yeah you can tell.
Richard: They’re not ostentatious, they’re not rambunctious, they are not lively individuals. Look, just look at their leaders, just look at their mentors, look at their heroes (together with Byrne)… Bill Gates!!!
Byrne: Having dived into the money pool at the deep end, it’s now a matter of swimming like crazy.theglobe.com still hasn’t turned a profit, and that’s typical. To buy dot com is to invest in the future.
Byrne: Most Internet companies will fail. A very few will succeed spectacularly. It’s the gamblers’ – sorry, traders’ – job to pick the winners, and avoid the splat of a bursting bubble.
Steph: While you’re doing laps, I’m sitting there like watching the drip of the, the grease drip off the burger… One of us ain’t going to make it.
Byrne: : Is there a bubble going on in Internet stocks? Steph: I don’t describe it as a bubble. There’s a phenomena with Internet stocks versus all other stocks. That’s been going on since the internet started. That phenomenon continues. As long as people are inspired and think the Internet is huge and different the valuations will continue to be huge and different.
Todd: It’s no different than when the cable industry started, it’s no different from when the first television network started in the early 1900s. The reality is, any time you have a new set of companies, that can capture the potential for a massive audience, they’re going to see those high valuations. Valuations because they can have access to all these users.
Wachtel: Old timers like us wait for the day of reckoning. Wait for the day when these people who are speculating to be smacked down. Everybody’s invested, everybody’s happy, everybody’s making money… ah, something’s wrong here,
Yardeni: Hopefully there is no end. I mean there is always an end to our individual lives, but I think the Internet technologies, the technology revolution has already created a tremendous amount of prosperity for us worldwide. I think that is going to continue. There is no reason why we couldn’t extrapolate that to the moon at this point.
Traffic/music
Byrne: In New York they’re partying as if the good times are here to stay . But then the inhabitants of the financial capital of the world have always been extremely confident. Just as they’ve been before every big stock market crash in history.
Perhaps they’re right and this time, it is different. However it turns out, at the very end of a tumultuous century, it does seem appropriate that a new technology, and a new generation, are now leading the band.