August 27, 2007

Do Your Trading on the D.F. Stock Exchange

I’m giving serious consideration to starting my own stock exchange. How hard can it be?

To some degree, there is a money-where-your-mouth-is element to this. In column after column, I lampoon the Wall Street traders and their famous “jitters,” which for all I know may be making things there even worse. Just when the market starts to stabilize, out comes another D.F. column making fun of the Wall Streeters and the silly reasons they buy and sell.

Next thing you know, I’ve triggered more jitters, and the Dow is tanking again.

I am not very nice. It’s making me a little ashamed of myself, and I need to start channeling my snarkiness in more positive directions. So instead of constantly standing on the sidelines and pointing out how dumb they are, I should focus my energies on building something positive.

So I will. The DFSE will function a little differently. It better. And here are some of the ways in which it will:

- No watching the news while you’re trading. What are you going to see on there that will help you make a decision about your stocks anyway? Fox News Channel: Bush touts economy, pretty girl missing. CNN: Bush defends economy, Fidel Castro home décor feature. Financial News Network: Alan Greenspan has eggs for breakfast, Chairmangreenspan Bernanke asked for ID entering Federal Reserve building.

News just confuses traders. Headlines announce: “Beets Cure Cancer!” Market celebrates! Beet futures through the roof. Uh oh. Big Pharma tanks! Market gets the jitters! Uh oh! Micronesia invades Russia! Sell, man, sell!

That’s it. No more watching TV. Except maybe sports.

- No mutual funds or hedge funds. Everyone has these. It’s time for some new kinds of funds. For starters, we will pioneer jerk funds. Skilled investment professionals will build you a portfolio of companies with egomaniacal, ruthless CEOs, and these funds will be traded proudly on the DFSE. If any company included in one of these funds is found to have engaged in legitimate profit-sharing, charitable giving or flexible scheduling, investors will be forced to sell.

We will also pioneer the slush fund. It works like this: If you anticipate that your portfolio will gain value after you invest, and it does, you get the entire return on your investment, plus a slush machine for your office courtesy of 7-Eleven. If your portfolio loses money, you absorb all the losses and you’re forced to live for a year in a northern city that has a lot of freezing rain and no plows.

- No throwing paper. That’s just stupid. This isn’t eighth grade. But there needs to be some sort of adolescent behavior going on to make things interesting, so every DFSE trader will get his or her own MySpace, and that’s where you can say things about each other like: “What’s up ho bag! I had a blast trading with you on Thursday until that little situation with the fund managers and the goat. Sha, girl! WTF!”

See? Much more 21^st Century than throwing paper. Also, no goats allowed on the trading floor.

- No basis points allowed. No one who talks about basis points is participating in our stock exchange either. The value of our stock market will be measured in D.F. dollars, which will feature the image of yours truly. So when Lou Dobbs reports on the activities of the DFSE, it will sound like this: “Today, after making their way past all the foreigners who are ruining America, traders on the D.F. Stock Exchange drove the value of the DFSE up 3.1 percent to 13,245 D.F. dollars. Too bad I saw some foreigners while I was writing this story!”

Everyone will know exactly how many D.F. dollars their stocks are worth. If you want, you can redeem your D.F. dollars for real dollars or for stuff at the mall, as long as it wasn’t made by outsourced foreign labor, because that would upset Lou Dobbs very much.

Yep. No more snarky columns about Wall Street for me. From now on, I’m doing something positive, starting my own stock exchange, and respecting the right of the people on Wall Street to do what they want to do.

No I’m not.