Good riddance, 2001!
You’ve done the dirty business.
Now, get lost.
My, how times have changed.
As we usher in the new year, we can hardly recognize the old gang.
There’s an empty bar stool where not so long ago my pal Bre-Xer, drunk by the bull market, would triumphantly toast the Cell-Locs, Wi-Lans and VisuaLabs of the day-trading world before the bear market crashed the party.
Bre-Xer has gained respectable employment – shuffling the decks at the blackjack tables of a Calgary casino.
And has anybody seen those instant dot-com millionaires who used to show up at high school in white stretch limos?
Nowadays, you mention Nasdaq at a cocktail party and the room empties. It’s a dirty word.
Are these telling signs the bull will rule in 2002?
Who knows? The crystal balls are busted like the dot-com traders who believed Scott Paterson, the recently fired CEO of Yorkton Securities, when he touted Book4golf.com as $100 stock.
The brash Paterson recently apologized, in his final letter to colleagues, for his exuberance in promoting Book4golf.com which has fallen from grace with Paterson. It’s now a four-center.
Wall Street has also lost its cocksure arrogance.
Remember when bulls were bulls and bears were bears, and when heavy hitters on Wall Street like Abby Joseph Cohen, toast of the bull market, or Henry Blodget, once king of the Internet stocks, could ignite a rally in two minutes on CNBC?
Now Abby’s procrastinating and, even when she makes a call, the market doesn’t listen.
And Blodget’s gone to write a book about the crash of Internet stocks.
So is it a bull market or a bear market?
Call it a bore market.
The market’s hype machines – CNBC and ROB-TV – have nothing much to hype.
Even the celebrated CNBC star Maria Bartiromo looks pooped out by the market’s mixed messages.
Worse, the bulls and bears are having a terrible time making a strong case for anything.
The bulls are starting to sound kind of bearish and bears are starting to sound sort of bullish. If this keeps up, Peter Linder, the boom-or-bust oil and gas analyst who isn’t afraid to take a stance, will be sitting on a fence.
On Wall Street, some big-time market strategists are acting out of character. Which is to say they’re telling the truth and confessing the market has them befuddled. Jeez, they could give Wall Street a bad name.
A typical call of the market now goes something like this: “We think perhaps maybe the market may rally, but onlyif . . . ”
Even the bookshelves are failing to offer up any tantalizing goodies. Nobody’s churning out books anymore about how to get rich off the stock market in 60 seconds or less.
People have even stopped poking fun at Mr. Buy-And-Hold – Warren Buffett. The chat boards? Gone all to hell in a hand basket.
This exclusive club for sleazy day traders has been invaded by unwelcome guests – people with manners telling the truth.
What, no more bogus press releases?
Traders can’t even pick a good fight with their online brokerage anymore.
With day-trader granny back in the bingo hall, the brokerages are running like clockwork You make a bum trade online and there’s nobody to scream at.
Even those stock-pumping, tub-thumping CEOs of old seem to have lost a step or two in the braggadocio department.
High-tech CEOs, wounded by the bear, have become as wholesome as egg-nog without the rum, soft as Nortel stock. Barnum & Bailey would sack ’em in a minute.
Where have you gone, John Roth?
Will we ever see the bad old days again?
You know, the days when Uncle Al (Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve chairman) could sneeze the Dow Jones into a champagne-popping 300-point rally?
Now, he’s just an old man with a shiny briefcase.
HOT 2001 CANADIAN STOCK AMONG STOCKS OVER $1: Novagold Resources
NRI-TSE $1.75
Up $1.57 (+872.2%)
Most of all that glittered in the 2001 bear market was gold and Nova outshone ’em all, making a mad dash from 18 cents as the company made giant strides with its development of four multi-million-ounce gold deposits in Alaska. Amazingly, even after a nine-fold increase in share price, Nova doesn’t look all that pricey. The company, which hit a year high of $2.25 in November, is still trading at an attractive price/earnings ratio of 8.
COLD 2001 CANADIAN STOCK AMONG STOCKS OVER $1: Telesystem International Wireless
TIW-TSE $1.23
Down $37.32 (-96.8%)
While Nortel Networks hogged the spotlight as Canada’s hog of the year, there were several bigger stinkers among lower-profile tech companies. A cash crunch sent Telesystem reeling into the toilet late in the year, but the Montreal-based company's name itself should have set off the alarm bells for shareholders long before the stock tanked. If it had anything to do with a telephone, was international and wireless in this market in 2001, it was a three-alarm fire.
