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Stock Trading
One of the bolder claims made for the Internet – the “information superhighway” – is that it is a “democratizing” technology that partially redresses the imbalance between the individual and The Powers That Be. It is hard to gauge the effect of downloading, texting and chat-rooming in the public square, but in the private sector people have pretty much stormed the gates of the financial markets with their Web browsers, and stock trading will never be the same.
Frankly, many things won’t be the same, and good riddance, too. It was not that long ago that the princes and viscounts of Wall Street kept their doors closed and their windows shuttered against prying public eyes. The middle of the last century saw national political careers born of “trust busting” and the prosecution of “insiders.” Funny (and felonious) things happen in the dark, when financial manipulators collude to fix prices, restrict trade, prevent competition and, above all, keep secrets.
Free data, free minds
The 1970s through the early 1990s saw the precursors of the Internet transform the way that people communicated, in business and private. The copy machine, the fax machine, the continuing advances in computer science and telecommunications – all of this technological evolution facilitated the creation, capture, storage, transmission and analysis of information. In the West, where freer economies rely on the dissemination of accurate information for setting prices and coordinating supply and demand, stock trading changed dramatically.
More information, especially better and more current information, means more informed choices. It means more appropriate, effective and, yes, profitable ones, too. With computers now analyzing stock market conditions and trading stock, the rhythm of the financial markets has gone from the sedate pace of a Manhattan hansom cab to nearly the speed of light.
Money talks
Because of its history of greater freedom, the West is managing the transition into the post-information age (whatever it is going to be called) more smoothly than many other parts of the world. For Americans, most Europeans and many Asians, stock trading and other kinds of transaction seem perfectly safe to do online. These are great advances, but the changes wrought in other parts of the world are ever more dramatic.
Other countries have had to play catch up to the West, in both political and economic arenas. You can’t have free markets without the free flow of information. The countries of the late, unlamented Soviet Union are living laboratories, proving that where information proliferates and people learn about their world from other than “official” sources, things start changing politically, as well.
The idea that former members of the Lenin Youth Corps have their Lenovo PCs set up for stock trading, gambling and playing Grand Theft Auto games over the Internet must have the Bolsheviks turning over in their graves. The fact is, when people and nations are communicating and trading with one another, they are much less likely to go to war. In today’s world, that’s a good thing to know, and good reason to spread computers, information, Internet connections and every other kind of communications technology to every person in the world.
Now there’s a great investment!
Topics: Investing |
