Business

Ron Bartizek

January 11, 2009

Keeping an eye on stock prices 1 day at a time Ron Bartizek Business LOCAL

With ubiquitous Internet access and 24-hour financial news channels, no one reads the newspaper stock listings, right?

Wrong.

It’s become accepted truth that anyone with more than a passing interest in the financial markets wants instantaneous access to stock prices and business news. There’s a PC on every work desk and most kitchen tables, after all, and countless broker Web sites that can provide quick and easy pipelines to the latest blip in trading or the most current headline.

So why do some investors cling to old-fashioned print listings? As you might expect, most of them are from generations that didn’t grow up with computers; but that doesn’t mean they don’t know about them.

Take Jack Cardell, of Wilkes-Barre. Yes, he’s 75 years old and semi-retired, but he has a laptop computer. “(But) the thing sits idle,” he says, because he’s concerned that his identity or account information could be swiped.

Cardell also represents an era newspaper publishers dream would return. “I like to sit down with a cup of coffee and my paper,” he says. And he makes business editors warm all over by adding that stock listings are the main reason he buys a subscription.

I’ve learned that many readers like Cardell have invested way outside of the mainstream “widow and orphan” stocks that are assumed to be their bread and butter. As space for listings has shrunk – some newspapers bigger than The Times Leader don’t carry daily stocks at all – it has become less likely some of these thinly traded stocks will appear. That’s when my phone rings.

“People like me are probably calling and driving you nuts every day,” Cardell said last week. Well, not that much, but often enough that we frequently update the stocks readers request.

Another bit of conventional wisdom says that obsessing on daily – or hourly – stock prices may raise blood pressure but doesn’t do a thing for returns. Cardell has an answer to that: “It might be going out of business and I don’t realize it.” Or he might ask his broker to investigate if the price seems to be fluctuating erratically. He has a good, if painful example.

“I went deer hunting one time when I owned Enron,” he said. The stock went from 24 to 9 before he got back from his trip.

Vigilance hasn’t helped most investors much over the past year, Cardell among them. “I can’t believe how it just disappeared,” he mused about his account.

On the other hand, it may be that paying too close attention keeps us focused on the trees and not the forest. A stock that falls or rises 1 percent a day won’t stand out except when viewed over a longer time frame.

While the United States is about to add trillions to an already swollen national debt in a desperate economic stimulus package, our neighbors to the north are debating whether to end a more than decade-long string of budget surpluses.

We might take heart in Canada’s budget history; severe deficits in the mid-1980s were eliminated over a dozen years and until now had not returned. But the medicine was different from what we’re about to take – Canada’s government spending fell over 20 years to about 13 percent of GDP from nearly 21 percent while revenues stayed relatively stable.

Ron Bartizek, Times Leader business editor, may be reached at rbartizek@timesleader.com or 570-970-7157.

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