JOIN USWatching a series on the stock market scam of 1992 on an online streaming platform brought memories as a first-year medical student from three decades ago. Life seemed painfully slow and initiating study in pre-clinical subjects of anatomy, physiology and biochemistry was unlike the pre-university schedule.
Meanwhile, wealth was growing with each newspaper edition and not the proverbial tree. In the pre-internet days, success stories were read in bi-monthly magazines and there were accounts of 40-year-olds planning to retire with Rs 1 crore of net value. The bubble burst with the scam. Fortunes were wiped out, many came out of retirement to work and I got back to studying the health and disease of the human body.
The turn of the millennium brought out another frenzy in technology stocks which were valued at stratospheric prices, discounting their future earnings by decades. Again there were carefully crafted stories of young technologists with bright new ideas camping in dormitories in the Bay Area in California as they could not afford expensive accommodation.
We read such internet news articles on AOL using dial-up internet networks charging a call every three minutes. With the dotcom and K-10 stock crash in India, old-school brick-and-mortar services and utilities became the flavour of the early part of the first decade.
The real estate boom in the mid-2000s valued land banks without a single cement stilt in sight, at highly inflated rates. The mortgage crisis in the United States and its subsequent fall-out around the world led to another market crash and many realty companies have either disappeared or are yet to recover their value or deliver the promised home.
Towards the end of March 2020 came the lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic. The stock markets crashed like a pack of cards. Suddenly, all seemed lost and no one risked catching a falling knife. Work in the hospital was under the fear of infection, especially attending to emergent conditions which require emergent care.
After work and from the balcony of my home, I watched numerous ambulances racing on empty roads with patients to Covid treatment hospitals. Trains within eyeshot ferried migrant workers to their hometowns.
In the nine months of hide-and-seek between safety and possible infection, the stock markets have soared to new highs, zooming beyond 55,000 levels on the Sensex, with wild fluctuations on the way.
Young investors armed with powerful internet connections and apps are making individual investment decisions inspired at times by social media advice. Spare time and cash during the lockdown have given millennials the collective courage to challenge the most astute fundamental and technical investors on the markets. Hopefully, for these Robinhood investors, the next downward spiral does not end in a game-stop.