2001-10-20 - 2:05 a.m.

Okay, I know none of you probably give a damn about the stock market, but frankly, I don't care. This is too cool of a feeling for me not to relay.

The past few days, I've been as excited as a kid at Christmas. I know this is going to just make me look like a complete geek, but that's okay, if I didn't already, then you haven't been paying attention. Anyway, the reason I've been so excited?

It's Quarterly Earnings Report Season.

Okay, I know most of you probably don't even know what that is. Unless you're into the stock market or financing or anything like that, you have no reason to. I understand that. I'm going to give a quick explanation.

An earnings report is, basically, when a company tells how they've done over the past three months, how much money they've spent on things, how much they've taken in, how much they're owed, all that stuff. Now, any business day of the year, you can find some of these reports being released. But during a short period of time every three months, the news release world is flooded with reports. The idea is, during this time, investors are chomping at the bit to find positive reports and buy as the stock starts rising on the good earnings. So a business that times their releases with this season is more likely to be noticed by the investors who are hovering over conference calls like vultures over a fat, dehydrated baby elephant.

So yesterday I became one of those investors, picking through the dried remains of sad businesses, desiccated by the drop in the market following the terrorist attacks, looking for a tasty morsel. And wouldn't you know, I found one in The Cheesecake Factory, Inc.

And on Thursday, at about 1130 in the morning, I invested in The Cheesecake Factory (Stock ticker: CAKE). They were scheduled to put out their earnings report at 5 PM that day, and something told me it was going to be very good. I knew this report was going to be good, and this stock was going to go up.

I got home from work last night and went online to check out how CAKE's report had looked. I opened up the news, and there was the headline for their report. "The Cheesecake Factory Reports Record Financial Results for the Quarter Ended October 2, 2001"

Ooh, damn it feels good to be right. I mean, I knew that it was going to be good, but this was better than I expected. And so I held, and I waited. When I left for work this afternoon, CAKE had done very little in the market, not what I'd been hoping for. But I waited. I knew it was just a matter of time. I *knew* I was right.

And off for work I went, perfectly confident that this was going to go well for me. I came back at 3:20 and saw CAKE trading very heavily. The stock was climbing, and climbing, and climbing. It started to taper off at about 27.8. I'd bought it at 26.9, so this would be a fair profit, but I wasn't happy enough with it. I waited.

And it started climbing again. Bit by bit. It hit 27.88, but I still wasn't happy. So I put in an order to sell it if it got up to 27.90. I figured if it went up a full point, I could be satisfied. But suddenly, on something I saw happening, I decided to up my price. 27.93.

You know, when I played the stock market games and just used to pick stocks without actually buying them, I didn't fully grasp the exhilaration I'd feel when I personally would have an effect on the stock market. I mean, I, me, all by myself, could have a visible effect on what the economy was doing. I never really got what it was like. I felt that today. I felt the power. And damn it felt good.

Now, Datek Streamer gives a real time quote of the highest price anyone is currently willing to spend to buy a stock, and the lowest price anyone is currently willing to sell that same stock for, called, respectively, the bid and ask prices. After putting the price in for my stock of 27.93, I saw that became the ask price. Meaning I was offering my stock up at the lowest price available. Meaning if anyone sold at this moment, I would. But someone had to be willing to pay my price for it.

I watched the bid price rise from 27.87.

It hit 27.90. I could have gone back down at that moment and sold at that price. But I waited.

27.91…

27.92…

It hesitated there. People were bidding on my stock, offering higher and higher prices, specifically to meet my price. It was amazing. It was *my* stock people were jostling into position to buy. But they hesitated at 27.92. One more cent and they would have met my price. I waited, and I hoped.

27.93.

I leapt out of bed (where I keep my laptop) and yelled in triumph. Not because I had made any insane amount of money, or that that one cent difference in stock price mattered at all, really, but because I'd done it. *I* had chosen that price. I had controlled the way that stock moved. And I cheered again in amazement as I watched the stock start dropping after that. I checked, just to make sure, and sure enough, I had the day high. Less than twenty minutes before the market closed, and I had just sold that stock higher than anyone had all day. ANYONE! These are real, honest-to-goodness investors I'm trading with. In a market with other people who make their career out of this, I had sold higher than a single one of them. In fact, some of them had been vying to pay me for a stock that would, after I convinced them that my stock was worth 29.93, drop back down as far as 29.77 in about two minutes. It jumped up to 29.94 once, meaning one other person managed to sell just a bit higher than me in the next fifteen minutes. But damn, that feeling was so amazing. I, for that short period of time, took control of a part of the stock market. I was the one who drove the price of that stock. In a world full of people who have taken years of training and classes and have high level degrees, it was me, with my $700 of practice money that finished the day doing the best on that stock.

It's a truly electric feeling of power I can't fully describe. But damn it's good.

And for your viewing pleasure, here is the two day chart for CAKE. The red arrow is where and when I bought it yesterday. The green one is where I sold today.