The midday report from Wall Street was mixed, an electronic hieroglyph of ambiguous numbers and anxious voices. Had the late, lamented bull market suddenly roared back to life? Or was the bear just taking a breather before slouching back in search of fresh meat?
Joseph Shaposhnik, as usual, was unperturbed. Amid the scuffling of Nikes and the crunch of Doritos, the Chatsworth High School senior hastened to reassure his fellow stock club investors that the sky wasn't falling. Not yet, anyhow. Not so long as the Fed kept lowering interest rates and the anti-tax-cut herd in Congress didn't do anything dumb.
"We [need] positive news on the earnings front," Shaposhnik, 17, the club's founder and president, intoned in calm, CEO-esque cadences to the dozen students clustered in Room E-29 for their weekly powwow. "We also need to see an end of out-flows in mutual funds. And we'd like to see a more aggressive Fed."
As free-market battle cries go, it wasn't exactly Gordon Gekko's "greed is good." But Shaposhnik's up-tempo PowerPoint presentation was music to his peers. While politicians quiver and pundits stammer over Wall Street's swoon, one group of investors seems to be taking the gloomy fiscal news rather well: young people, at least in certain sanguine pockets of Southern California.
For Chatsworth's student stock club--several of whose members hail from totalitarian regimes where entrepreneurship is a four-letter word--the market's recent downward spiral wasn't really discouraging. Or so they claimed. Yeah, like most red-blooded Americans they'd prefer to see their investments go up.
But their eyes are fixed on the long-term prize: college tuition, first car payments, a comfortable future lifestyle. Knowing they're in the market for the long haul, not the short gain, they project themselves into prosperity. "I knew nothing about stocks, and to me it's the only way to become a millionaire," said Kim Nguyen, 17, when asked why she'd joined the stock club.
Shaposhnik, a witty and self-possessed young man, says he gradually has parlayed $3,000 in bar mitzvah gifts into investments worth roughly four times that much--even though the amount has shrunk lately as stocks have fallen. Not all high school students are so lucky. Yet, cushioned by youthful optimism, many young investors perceive Wall Street's current troubles only as a distant rumble. Unlike their baby boomer parents, obsessed with the minute fibrillations of an economy that grows younger and faster every week, kid investors may be less subject to impulse trading and market envy. Time, they believe, is still on their side.
