With stocks surging, it's too cool to talk about Wall Street

On the market

With stocks surging, it's cool to talk about Wall Street again

By Amy Baldwin ~ The Associated Press

NEW YORK -- At the gym and in elevators, it's no longer a taboo topic of conversation. On television shows like "Sex and the City," it's once again an acceptable subplot.

It's the stock market.

The market's long dive starting in 2000 made stocks too painful to talk about. But the move upward in recent months has revived the public's interest in investing and what stocks are hot. While the talk is nothing like the feverish levels of the late 1990s, the stock market is no longer off-limits.

"Everyone is saying, 'Well, it was a pretty good day. Knock on wood,"' said Heather Dell, a sales executive at a Manhattan advertising firm.

When stocks were sprinting to all-time highs, the market "was all anybody talked about. Then, as people got laid off and our investments dwindled, our meetings (with friends) were like psychiatry sessions. ... Then nobody talked about it," said Dell, 32.

But the market is regaining its mass appeal, even figuring prominently in the recent season premiere of the HBO comedy series, "Sex and the City."

Titled "To Market, To Market," the show opened with heroine and newspaper columnist Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, ringing the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate her paper going public (Parker also rang the bell to start an actual NYSE session). Wall Street was featured in the episode's storyline, with one of Carrie's friends buying the newspaper's shares.

While that's fiction, it does mirror the true-life scenario playing out as the market's 2003 rally enters its fifth month.

Online broker Scottrade had its biggest day ever June 6, handling 106,000 trades. For the month of June, Scottrade's daily trading average was about 75,000 transactions, nearly three times the 28,562 of June 2002.

"It is just a huge pickup in demand and a change in psychology that is different than I have seen before. It is just an extreme change in investor psychology," said Rodger Riney, chief executive of Scottrade.

Dell said she has increased her 401(k) contributions during the past month, from 3 percent of her pre-tax income to 15 percent and she is buying individual stocks again.

Stocks have rallied since mid-March on a series of positive developments. Companies posted surprisingly strong first-quarter earnings and the war in Iraq ended swiftly. Congress passed a $350 billion tax cut package, which reduced the rates investors pay on corporate dividends. The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates for the 13th time since early 2001.

The turnaround in investor attitude helped the Standard & Poor's 500 index end the second quarter up a healthy 14.9 percent, its best quarterly gain since the fourth quarter of 1998, when it climbed 20.9 percent.

Still, Wall Street is a long way from the late 1990s bull market, when investors couldn't stop buying shares, when there seemed to be no end to stocks' amazing heights and when nearly every day a new dot-com company went public.

While the Nasdaq composite index, the star of the last bull market, is up a stunning 31 percent so far for 2003, it's still down about 65 percent from its all-time high of 5,048.62, reached on March 10, 2000.

The Dow Jones industrial average is up nearly 10 percent for the year so far, but it's down almost 22 percent from its record high of 11,722.98, which it hit Jan. 14, 2000.

And, trillions of dollars remain on Wall Street's sidelines, or in other words, in low-yielding money market accounts and certificates of deposit.

So while investors are talking about the market again, many are still cautious when it comes to putting their money back in.

"I think they are going to be a little smarter, for a least a little while," said Fred Siegel, author of "Investing for Cowards" and host of a financial advice radio show in New Orleans, "Talking Money."