...and I dropped it off at the Apple Store for repair on Friday afternoon. It returns on Wednesday. Thank goodness for Apple Care, but what an annoyance. I have a friend who went through this two months ago, same model.
I Love Apple and I Love nVidia, but I sure didn't love the lost productivity.
And of course, it happened during the week of The Big Deadline! Oy.
Here's why Those Who Know are chuckling at the e-Trade (known amongst day traders as e-Turd) disqualification of wide-eyed hacker types trying to get in on the Red Hat IPO: for an Internet IPO (which Red Hat is, sort of) the best way to lose a lot of money is to place a market order for shares on the day they open. Here is a recent anecdote to back up the principle...
My darling wife is a wise day trader (a.k.a. White Collar Gambler -- really, she gets that a lot). As part of her setup for trading, she monitors both the AOL day trading chat room (known as the Shark Tank) and the IRC channel #daytraders. These are two resources that at-home day trader types use to maintain community. The AOL chat room has a maximum capacity of 100 users, while the IRC channel nominally has ~1400 users. Aside from commenting on the hair styles (or lack thereof) of the announcers on CNBC, they tell each other what they are buying as a sort of feedback loop for themselves.
On the day that MP3.com (NASDAQ:MPPP) IPOed, my wife got a message from her fellow daytrader (we'll call her "Jane Trader"). Jane was in a panic... she had placed a market order for 500 shares of MPPP and it had been filled at 98. Jane figured it would go way up -- after all, it's an Internet stock on an IPO, right? Well, when she messaged my wife, the price had gone down to 68 and didn't look like it was going to go up any time soon. On the advice of my wife Jane sold 250 shares at 70 as a hedge against a bigger loss, and held the rest of the shares overnight. We haven't heard the end of the story, but today MPPP is trading at 47.
The moral of the story is that IPOs can be a great way to lose a bunch of money if you don't know what you are doing. Even though a stock is Internet-related, it doesn't mean that it will start low and end up high in a nice, monotonically-increasing function. There can be an incredible amount of churn in the price of a stock during the day of its IPO. The key to this is that a newbie typically places market orders, which means that they get the market price. The market price is literally the price the stock gets at the moment the order is placed, which means that you get no control over exactly which price you get. Combine the two (churn and no control over price) and the result is a potential disaster.
Since so many people are jumping into the market, and since so many of those people have no clue what they are doing at first, there are lots and lots of people who are losing money. In modern America, this translates into lots of lawsuits against on-line brokers like e-Trade. It is for this reason that e-Trade has its policies about who can and cannot participate in an IPO. They don't love you; they just don't want to get sued.
It's much easier to make a lot of money on an IPO if you start out with shares that you got from your company when the price was 10 cents per option...
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...and I dropped it off at the Apple Store for repair on Friday afternoon. It returns on Wednesday. Thank goodness for Apple Care, but what an annoyance. I have a friend who went through this two months ago, same model.
I Love Apple and I Love nVidia, but I sure didn't love the lost productivity.
And of course, it happened during the week of The Big Deadline! Oy.
This agress with my analysis... sorta fun, actually, although the sadistic sort who put word #494 in the mix deserves to edit at WIRED... ;-)
Here's why Those Who Know are chuckling at the e-Trade (known amongst day traders as e-Turd) disqualification of wide-eyed hacker types trying to get in on the Red Hat IPO: for an Internet IPO (which Red Hat is, sort of) the best way to lose a lot of money is to place a market order for shares on the day they open. Here is a recent anecdote to back up the principle...
My darling wife is a wise day trader (a.k.a. White Collar Gambler -- really, she gets that a lot). As part of her setup for trading, she monitors both the AOL day trading chat room (known as the Shark Tank) and the IRC channel #daytraders. These are two resources that at-home day trader types use to maintain community. The AOL chat room has a maximum capacity of 100 users, while the IRC channel nominally has ~1400 users. Aside from commenting on the hair styles (or lack thereof) of the announcers on CNBC, they tell each other what they are buying as a sort of feedback loop for themselves.
On the day that MP3.com (NASDAQ:MPPP) IPOed, my wife got a message from her fellow daytrader (we'll call her "Jane Trader"). Jane was in a panic... she had placed a market order for 500 shares of MPPP and it had been filled at 98. Jane figured it would go way up -- after all, it's an Internet stock on an IPO, right? Well, when she messaged my wife, the price had gone down to 68 and didn't look like it was going to go up any time soon. On the advice of my wife Jane sold 250 shares at 70 as a hedge against a bigger loss, and held the rest of the shares overnight. We haven't heard the end of the story, but today MPPP is trading at 47.
The moral of the story is that IPOs can be a great way to lose a bunch of money if you don't know what you are doing. Even though a stock is Internet-related, it doesn't mean that it will start low and end up high in a nice, monotonically-increasing function. There can be an incredible amount of churn in the price of a stock during the day of its IPO. The key to this is that a newbie typically places market orders, which means that they get the market price. The market price is literally the price the stock gets at the moment the order is placed, which means that you get no control over exactly which price you get. Combine the two (churn and no control over price) and the result is a potential disaster.
Since so many people are jumping into the market, and since so many of those people have no clue what they are doing at first, there are lots and lots of people who are losing money. In modern America, this translates into lots of lawsuits against on-line brokers like e-Trade. It is for this reason that e-Trade has its policies about who can and cannot participate in an IPO. They don't love you; they just don't want to get sued.
It's much easier to make a lot of money on an IPO if you start out with shares that you got from your company when the price was 10 cents per option...