Schmuck.com

Money is the bottom line, always has been. Maybe it didn’t seem that way before Reagan, before Gordon Gekko, before Milken and Boesky and Icahn and Madoff, before our current I’m a billionaire many times over president, before them all. Way back when I was younger, young even, and people were dancing in the mud and pay per view was a quarter in Times Square and not a hundred bucks for the WWE in the living room.

I have a home office. There is no coffee clutch, no elevator interaction, no lunchtime banter with associates in the park. Just the occasional overnight mail deliveryman and two other friends with home offices in different states with whom I share daily complaints via phone or email.

Many years ago, I can assure you that our whining had nothing to do with money, but it does now. For the past two plus decades, like much of the country, we have had a now rancid fascination with the stock market. All day long, the 1, 2, 3, and 4 letter symbols flash by at the bottom of our screens. (Do they move left to right or right to left?) A hypnotic perpetual motion machine that would probably serve well as an improved eye chart if the entire country’s financial future and mood were not so wrapped up in it. My two friends and I are not alone, far from it. We see the true believers at Schwab and Fidelity and we hear the conversations behind the delicatessen counter. On a good market day, I chuckle; on other days, I cringe and depart for the pizzeria next door where the talk is all cheese and Yankees baseball.

FB…INTC…AAPL…AMZN…NFLX…

After awhile, even an amateur like me gets to know many of the companies behind the letters. I get to hear so many things about these companies that I never thought would enter my consciousness. Revenues, earnings, growth targets, P/E multiples. I even typically get a glimpse of the façade of their headquarters, often an imposing building in some suburban community that had been wheat stalks and dirt roads until the given symbol arrived in town. How did I ever get to care about a single one of them?

I learn the terminology. Earnings surprises. Double dipping. On the heels of. All-time high. Lots of stock for sale. Beat the street. Economic headwinds.

I learn the personalities and they almost seem like friends. Jim Kramer, Joe Kernen, David Faber, Ron Insana, Bob Pisani, Maria Bartiromo, Liz Claman, Sue Herrera, Michelle Cabruso Cabrera. The same guests, spaced one to three months apart, saying much the same things. The bulls who seem to be on less often when the market is tanking. The bears who are always on when the sky seems to be the limit. Occasionally, I turn proactive and switch to Bloomberg or the Wall Street report on public television. Let’s face it, it’s everywhere.

Would we rather work out the problems of the customers on the other end of the line over the next three months, do actual work that is, or hit a few keys and pray? Trouble is that our prayers have been answered only in lost dollars and lost time.

Which brings me to the real point here. Please do not think me paranoid, self-absorbed, or some mutant disciple of Jim Carrey’s Truman, but not too long ago I discovered www.schmuck.com and learned that my two friends and I are the source. Whatever we elect to do in the stock market---be it buy a hundred shares of Verizon, buy or sell an option call on IBM, flee from a virus that’s ending the world, change our portfolio allocation to more or less cash, increase our exposure to companies overseas, ignore a virus that’s creating tremendous opportunity---is carefully logged, organized, chronicled, digitized, analyzed, and broadcast. All subscribers to www.schmuck.com get instant, real-time access to our financial moves. No wonder that the market takes only minutes, sometimes just seconds, to react. When my trio of home office lonelies buy, our chosen securities are sent spiraling downward, often out of control, like a rollercoaster unhinged from its tracking. And when we opt to sell, the bandwidth explodes with buy orders as word spreads to Des Moines and Dubai.

We move markets, Steven Mnuchin, Larry Kudlow and Jerome Powell be damned.

It had gotten so bad for us that it appeared my friends and I would have to go cold turkey on the market and return to actual work. But then it hit me. There is an enormous opportunity here, a real ramp-up to roll out, or roll-out to ramp up, who knows, I’m still learning. Maybe even go public someday or private if that doesn’t work. Barron’s, CNBC, Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg, Money, Kiplinger’s, and all the rest of you. We are available. All three of us. To give you our inclinations, our leanings, our thoughts, before we make the trades. Imagine knowing what the schmucks are going to do minutes, sometimes even hours, before they actually do it.

Imagine that.