It seems like yesterday that we were pounding out the first column. Actually, it was six years ago.

How can we ever forget the unforgettable year 2000? Life was all roses and champagne and hot tips from shoeshine boys.

The bubble-headed stock market resembled a stumbling drunk precariously leaning on a lamp post - but few investors had the foresight to administer a sobriety test. Hey, it's not easy to bolt the premises during Happy Hour, is it?

In October of 2000, when Business Edge launched its inaugural issue, Nortel Networks was flirting with its all-time high of $110 per share and a tipsy rookie financial columnist led off with a light-hearted piece about the perils of talking to strangers. Strangers with stock tips.

File photo by Shannon Oatway, Business Edge
Business Edge columnist Gyle Konotopetz didn't enjoy eating his words, with sour cream and perogies, after losing a bet.

In retrospect, with Nortel, the one-time 800-lb. gorilla on the Toronto Stock Exchange, down a tad these days (ok, 98 per cent!), perhaps we should have been somewhat more assertive and somewhat less tongue-in-cheek. Which is to say we should have been chucking the old Remington typewriter off a rooftop and screaming, red-faced, at the top of our lungs, SELL NORTEL!!!!!!!!! THIS $%##%&@# COMPANY CAN'T COUNT SHEEP!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Undoubtedly, if we had done so, the editor would have promptly instituted drug testing for Edge scribes and a lynch mob of Nortel stockholders and cheerleaders (ie. analysts) would have sent Tie Domi to my house to abruptly terminate this scribe's career at one column.

Instead, I could have spent the past six years hiding out in the bushes at Rabbit Lake, Sask., scaling slimy jackfish and missing all the fun. You know, the juicy scandals, starring Nortel, Enron, WorldCom, VisuaLabs, Amaranth, Bernie Ebbers, Jeff Skilling, Conrad Black, Martha Stewart, Henry Blodgett et al.

During the go-go days of Dot-Con and World-Con, if you didn't own Nortel or Wi-Lan or Enron or Book4golf.com - you were a square. The age-old stock market mantra of buy low, sell high was out of fashion. Warren Buffett, the world's most famous investor, was a dinosaur, resisting everything tech. You bought high, bought higher and bought highest. And boasted about it.

You didn't sell. Nope, you didn't even THINK about selling.

Then, as the market started to sober up and Nortel stock swooned from over $100 to $50 in about three months, many shell-shocked investors went into the denial phase, desperately averaging down, certain that they'd make a killing when the stock made its next charge to $200.

Mind you, not everyone on the street was pounding the table on tech. There was the odd party pooper raining on the dot-com parade. Ross Healy was one of those scorned as an oddball money manager, taking on Bay Street almost single-handedly and courageously ranting about what he saw as a preposterous valuation for Nortel, this at a time when stratospheric price/earnings ratios over 100 were considered not nuts but sexy. Initially, Healy's Nortel call was generally dismissed by the masses as a crank call.

When Healy, CEO of Strategic Analysis Corp., pronounced in this column that Nortel was headed to $18 in short order when it was trading in the $50 range in early 2001, we also challenged him, vowing to literally eat our words if Nortel did hit his $18 target.

About four months later when Nortel hit $18, my alert editor Terry Inigo-Jones kindly reminded this rookie columnist of this significant milestone - and promptly booked a table at a Calgary eatery for the ceremonial column-eating debacle.

Healy's office would request photos of the event.

That was the first great lesson learned from the great bull market: One must never eat newsprint with perogies and sour cream.

The words stick in the teeth, not just the craw, adding insult to humiliation. Better to wash it all down with a bottle of Smirnoff.

Admittedly, there was one other lesson. Never, never make stock market predictions, particularly those that concern a razor-sharp falling knife (i.e. Nortel).

Silly stock market predictions that rarely an out have become the favourite pastime of the financial game.

The investment landscape is littered with shattered crystal balls and crushed egos but the soothsayers, nevertheless, persist in continuing to mislead the public.

Of course, the poor research analysts have no choice in the matter. Despite a woeful track record and the fact that forecasting stock prices is a mug's game, analysts continue to issue recommendations and 12-month price targets for stocks because that's what they are paid to do.

Worse, many retail investors actually still give credence to those recommendations and numbers.

The growing obsession over making bold stock market predictions is not restricted to the sell-side analysts.

Fuelled by the pressure of stock market television and ratings-hungry commentators who exhort experts to "cut to the chase," prognostication is all the rage. Even the buy-side analysts (i.e. fund managers) have gotten into the act, presumably because they don't want analysts to get all the credit for making asses of themselves.

If you're wise, you make your calls on the market without providing a timeline - or at least a timeline in the current millennium.

It's highly likely that you won't be around to eat your words if you predict the price of gold will hit $5,000 US per ounce or the price of oil will hit $500 US per barrel some time before the year 2100.

Then there are those who seem to relish in shooting themselves in the feet with outrageous calls.

Brian Acker, the cocky CEO of Acker Finley Asset Management, told Report On Business TV last year that his grandchildren would never see $500 US gold. Within a few months, gold hit $725 US per ounce and Acker's grandchildren were famous.

Back in the sunny dot-com days, Acker probably would have been let off the hook for making a goofy call.

But times have changed and Acker, a regular guest on ROB-TV's Market Call program, is constantly needled about that busted golden crystal ball.

It's heartening to see a new breed of stock market player emerging in the game.

This one sports less swagger and bravado, and more modesty and cynicism.

And, most importantly, he or she comes armed with a measure of hard-earned savvy to shrug off some of the hype and nonsense that emanates from the street.

So, while riding off into the sunset, we take some solace in the fact that today's investor has some street smarts to weather the storm - and wash it down with Smirnoff.

Before we go, one last prediction for old time's sake. The sun will rise in the east. Some time before the next millennium.

* SAGE WORDS: "Always drink upstream from the herd."

- Will Rogers.

(Gyle Konotopetz can only be reached for a short time at gyle@businessedge.ca; but anybody with a hot stock tip is welcome to drop by Rabbit Lake, Sask.)