2001-09-16 - 4:44 p.m.

For over a year and a half now, I've been watching the stock market. It started with the MSSM Investment Club, which, while having probably one of the coolest group pictures in the yearbook, failed miserably in our attempts to pool our collective knowledge and win a team stock market game. In fact, we failed miserably to make a profit… or break even… or even walk away with our e-shirts on our back.

But while we slowly lost almost every fake dollar we had in the game, some of us still learned. I know I did. I couldn't tell you a single thing I learned from it, but that I slowly started to just understand. I could watch business news releases and financial reports coming to me in real time and I'd write a stock down, and within an hour it would be up between 5 and 33 percent. And those percentage points would have been full profit, if only I had the money to invest. People would ask me what I did, what I'm doing, how it works, what they should be doing. I couldn't tell them. Not that I wouldn't want them to make the money, too, but I honestly didn't understand. I could point out things I did, but I couldn't tell them why I chose that stock. How did I know Barbecues Unlimited was going to go up 25% in two hours? I don't know. But I just knew, and it just did (true story).

Time passed, and I would get closer and closer to having the money to invest, either through friends who trusted me or through things with my own life. But I just couldn't ever get it. Finally, almost a year after I was supposed to get it, and when I needed it most, I got a check that I was supposed to get from Upward Bound for $1500. With that, after I'd moved and gotten settled, I signed up for an account with Datek online and sent them $800 of that original $1500 so I could start investing. It's a risky amount, since I have to make about 3% on each investment to make up for commissions, but it's what I had.

Now, this is not all pure greed here. This is not me doing this to become Big Rich Investor-Type Person, as much as I'd like to be. Because I don't see that happening. But if I'm as good with actual money as I am with my predictions, then I'll be able to pay off my past debts on schools and my credit card so I can move on with my life again and start looking forward to my next schooling somewhere where I really want to be. This was the way to pay for my dreams, my hopes, my life.

Monday morning (September 10th) I made my first ever trade as a Datek customer. I saw a company with the ticker ESPD (I don't remember the actual company, if that tells you how much I work on instincts), and some news about it told me that it was going to leap up in price in a few minutes. But because it was my first trade, I hesitated. I wasn't sure I trusted my own instincts enough to put my money into it. On the Streamer, I watched as it slowly rose, just as I expected, and I decided to invest. Put my money in, then watched the stock rise. 6%, 7.5%, 9%, 10.2%, 11%, 13%, 12.8%, 13.1%, 12.7%, 13.2%. I decided to sell right there. If I'd gotten it sooner I'd have made more money, but as it was, I was destined to make about $80 in fifteen minutes. Not bad on a $600 investment. I put the sale in and let it go. I smiled at my impending profits and looked back at my portfolio.

$800.79

What? I made 79 cents? How did I only make 79 cents? I looked back at Streamer, which has a little graph of what the stock has done in the past ten minutes. I saw a quick downward spike that lasted mere seconds before coming back up. The time on it started just a bit before I put in my sale, and ended just after it. Apparently the price had hiccuped just before I sold, and I didn't notice it. And with that, my eighty dollars had become eighty cents. That's when I learned a few things about trading in the real world, so that wouldn't happen again.

Tuesday morning, I did the same thing I'd been doing the day before. I watched business news reports and put stocks up to watch on the Streamer, though not one moved. I thought it was strange, but didn't know what to think about it. That's when I heard about it. And everything changed.

In the past week, I've written about the WTC attack four times since Tuesday. That's because it's been on my mind all week, no matter what else has been happening, it's at least been in the back of my head. There have been moments all week that bring an all new aspect of it rushing back to me for one reason or another.

I walked by a nighttime Economics class full of employees of my building after the rest of the building had already left work on Thursday. I was on my way to the cafeteria. The woman teaching the class was standing and pointing to an easel that I couldn't see. She said to the class "the economy is probably… going to take a dive—a *small* one!—but a dive nonetheless.

I got angry. Because, dammit, terrorists have no right to dictate what our economy is going to do. That's the wonder of a democracy! A few people who disagree with an entire nation are not allowed to make the decisions for that nation! We, the American people, have the right to *decide* how we want to deal with this. We can sit behind in fear, rushing to the banks and taking our money out in a panic. We can sell off everything we have in the stock market afraid of a crash that doesn't have to happen, and make it happen. *OR* we can come out on top, closing on Monday with the market climbing more than it has in months. That way we can step up and say that if the people standing in candlelight vigils over the country, and filling blood banks and crying about people they've never met isn't enough to show how much we, as a nation, stand behind each other, then we can point to the bottom line, the numbers, and show the people responsible that they failed. That while their planes may have hit their targets, and they may have caused most of the physical damage they attempted to cause, the blow to our country was not what they'd hoped, and we are ready to stand back up, stronger than ever.

Through msn.com I found a bunch of message boards of people who were afraid of what this was going to do. Saying all they had was 401(k)s for their retirement, and if things crashed, they didn't know what they would be able to do for the future. Then as people responded to that, I saw this outpouring of people calling to not let us panic. People planning to go take whatever money they could and invest it to keep our country going, maybe better than before. And it felt good to read. It felt very good to read. The rallying of a nation. And while it may sound selfish, I was very happy to see that my hopes for a prosperous near future would not be dashed by this. And not just because I'm going to hopefully still be able make money (not on the tragedy, just in general, like I would have on Monday if I wasn't an idiot), but because the hopes and dreams and financial security of people around the country might still be safe, even if the dreams of the people directly involved won't be for a very long time. Our country can stand strong in the wake of this, and keep going so our future will be safe. We will win, we will come out on top, and it all starts tomorrow. I know I'm going to be right on my computer first thing tomorrow morning, ready to invest. And I hope, for those of you who do it, too, you'll be there with me.