Apr 26th, 2008
Economy of Technology: The Joy of Stocks
When I was in intermediate school, back before the turn of the millennium, we had an assignment in math class to choose a few stocks and track them daily. While this was probably a horrible introduction to personal finance, it did illustrate a few things:
It was incredibly difficult to read those stock listings in the newspaper; not only was the font tiny but the lines seemed to blend together–and that’s with the eyes of a thirteen year old!
It was very tedious to track the stock prices on paper, by hand, without even a calculator to use.
I had great difficulty seeing why anyone would spend that much time to track small movements of a stock on a daily or even weekly basis.
Today, things have changed dramatically. I have any number of tools available to make things tremendously easier. The introduction of the spreadsheet back in the late 1970s (Visicalc, anyone?) already took away a lot of the headache of looking at stock prices. The advent of the Internet made the headaches fade even more–this one link gives me almost all the information I need to know about every single stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average–and this doesn’t even touch on software like Quicken or The Mint. I can easily get historical quotes, graph results, compare one stock to any number of others or the index, and even buy and sell quickly and at low cost. A trade today costs less than the long distance phone call did back in the early 80s!
As much as information overload is an issue (in online life in general, not just with financial information), I can’t argue that the old way is better. I can get all the information I need about a stock, fund, or bond free, quickly, and execute a low cost trade without needing to even pick up a phone. The information age has made investing incredibly better than it was less than a quarter century ago!
[...] Uncommon-cents reminds us of the economy of technology and the joy of stocks. [...]