The S&P has been rocked over the last week with value off nearly 20% as of this morning. But how far has this put the market back? The answer may surprise you.
August 26th last year.
That’s it. We have only given up the gains of the last six months. How much better or worse off were you at the end of August? I’m guessing that your answer is “pretty much the same.” Keep that in mind.
The Corona Virus is very dangerous, but not because dozens of people will die from it. Thousands of people die from the regular old flu each year. The danger is that fear of the Corona Virus will make people stay home from work, provide an excuse to skip that conference they kind of didn’t want to go to anyway, postpone starting a new deal, etc. All these seemingly one-off, innocuous, changes in behavior will add up until people start losing their jobs, their retirement savings, and their homes.
So if you want to protect yourself and your community from the real dangers of the Corona Virus, do your job, pursue opportunities, walk to Starbucks – do everything exactly like you were doing last August.
Joe Ricketts is the founder of Ameritrade, and he was my boss. I was initially hired to run marketing but was quickly moved to the more historically interesting job of leading the company to the Internet (with a capital I, because back then it was spelled that way). During the creation of this book, I was interviewed several times and it’s hard to remember everything I said, but I do think the following story will be new.
In the fall of 1995, we launched the world’s first internet trading site under the brand, Aufhauser. Aufhauser was a scrappy New York based brokerage which we had recently purchased – I think largely to provide us some NY street cred which as Omaha “bumpkins”, we were in desperate need. Aufhauser had been uniquely using the internet as a platform for messaging between clients and brokers.
Understand that at this time, no one had ever traded stocks on the internet. In fact, No one had ever paid a bill on the internet, transferred money on the internet, or even viewed a statement on the internet. We were the absolute first financial services company to have a functioning website! We may have been the first to have any website, but I am not certain of that.
From a technical perspective, it wasn’t that difficult. We already had a call-and-response system (an API) created for our touch-tone phone application so we could get the information to the client’s web page. The real challenge was navigating the unexpected objections of just about everyone!
One of my favorite brouhahas from the period involved the exchanges (The New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ), the regulators, and our compliance team. They all hated me, and I like to think Arthur Levitt, Chairman of the SEC at the time, may have even known my name (but he probably did not). The issue, which has been thoroughly eliminated since, was real-time verses delayed stock quotes.
Randolph and Mortimer Duke. Old-timey Brokers.
You see, the exchanges did not want regular-guy investors to have access to real-time stock quotes. Old-timey stockbrokers (think: Randolph and Mortimer Duke, left) were big clients of the exchanges and access to real-time quotes was one of the reasons people had brokers. Every time that phone rang, the broker had a chance to push another transaction and trade commissions were hundreds or even thousands of dollars per trade. As a result, financial service companies who wanted to share stock prices electronically did so by delaying the quotes by 20 minutes.
But the regulators –
the people from the executive branch of the government who enforce laws –
required that every trade be preceded by the presentation of a real-time quote.
Even if an investor wanted to buy a stock and hold it for 20 years, he had to
see the actual price at the time of purchase.
Previous electronic systems such as Ameritrade’s touch-tone trading and clunky Accutrade for Windows had located a compromise wherein real-time prices would be delivered at trade-time and delayed prices would be used everywhere else. This was the model we were following when we launched. Business was slow at first, but within a few months people started to take notice, and I got a call from compliance.
Um, yeah…
I don’t remember who worked in compliance or who called me, but over the years I have inserted Bill Lumbergh into my recounting of the story. “Um, yeah”, drawing out that second word as long as possible, “we are going to need you to stop using real-time quotes on the internet.”
Compliance was the organization in our company – any company – that ensures that laws are being followed down to the letter but also that contracts are being adhered to. They watched our every move and scrutinized every application we built. The internet was untested territory and, although I am speculating, our recent success had been noted by brokers who were pressuring the exchanges to keep professional tools out of the hands of retail investors. The exchanges were very clear that this violation put our service with them in jeopardy. In no uncertain terms: to continue would risk our access to real-time quotes altogether and threatened our ability to stay in business.
Adhering to their
request required choosing between two untenable options. We could provide
delayed quotes at trade time – and be in violation of the law, or we could stop
allowing trades over the internet all together. I thought hard about this
before going to Joe Ricketts with my thoughts. Joe and I had a great
relationship at the time. I had shown him I was capable, I had made a positive
impact, and he gave me more than enough rope to hang myself and the whole
company.
I returned to my team with the news. “Fuck it, we are moving forward as is.” I expect that, at the same time, Joe was on the phone warning compliance to buckle up because the next week was a bull ride worthy of a rodeo. Compliance was fighting with exchanges, exchanges were fighting with regulators, and regulators were trying to figure out how they had gotten stuck in the middle of this. I took calls from all sides, received an earful, and was called an upstart (maybe more than once). But at my core I knew that efficiency always prevails over the objections of those profiting from that efficiency. Our business depended on exactly one outcome, and I was confident it would come.
And it did. The law
won out, and the exchanges agreed to allow real-time quotes in certain
situations and in return for a hefty sum every time one was presented.
I remember a year following this event, Amazon announced that for the first time, they had surpassed $1 million dollars in a single day. No one called us for that story, but we had been doing 100 times that for months. According to a recent story on NBC, TD Ameritrade now processes nearly 1 million trades (and an estimated total value of $1 billion) per day.
This story started off as a classical example of the exchanges’ channel conflict – one company profiting from two clients who had competing business models. In retrospect, the resolution was the moment when the new disrupted the old, the tipping point was reached, and the paradigm shifted. When that happened, every obstacle to internet trading had been eliminated, the industry was allowed to rush forward, and it did. I am proud to have been there.
I really love this concept but question its potential without some toothy legislation to support it. Truman’s sends cleaning supplies via Fedex or UPS in a cardboard box which you refill with concentrates that they also send you – via similar albeit smaller chipping containers. I heard the product described as “only slightly more expensive than the better cleaning products you get in the store.” I will add that they are also significantly less convenient.
If the question is feeling good about our personal footprint, these green (ish) but inconvenient products may allow us, affluent societally-conscious city-dwellers, to do something and send the right message to our children, but most Americans cannot afford to pay many times more than dollar-store prices, and jump through a bunch of hoops, to attain one-percenter benefits.
On the other hand, if the question is reducing the amount of waste society creates, the right answer is to support reusability with meaningful garbage collection fees calculated by usage – in other words, charge people for what they throw away. This would require an entirely new model for waste management. Garbage cans or trucks might need scales and geometric volume scanners for calculating each house’s waste. If you throw away a lot of stuff, you are going to pay a lot of money. If you reuse and repurpose everything (don’t get me started on recycling), you could pay close to nothing. Sounds like a fun home-ec game to play with the family, and it offers real cash prizes!
Of course there are the political obstacles. The exact same politicians who would hop all over the green elements of this concept would oppose its regressive taxation appearance. Regressive taxation is one that hurts poor people and is insignificant to rich people. But that too is manageable if collection rates vary by neighborhoods with lower rates in poor neighborhoods and exorbitant rates in rich neighborhoods (similar to property taxes). The program only works if everyone feels it when they don’t comply, so it would need to feel relatively expensive to everyone across the spectrum.
I am a firm believer that government should stay out of the way of self-interest. But where government is effective and needed is in preventing people from pursuing self-interest that harms others (that’s why we have police and courts for example). I think garbage creation – as necessary as it is – can fit this category. And who knew there were so many great Simpson’s GIFs about garbage!
A Card Carrying Centrist 