>As some of you know, I am currently doing some contract work for Schwab
>in San Francisco. I have been interested, in the past few days, to read
>the companywide emails the CEO has been putting out. It seems that the
>trading volume for the first few weeks of 1999 have been completly
>unprecendented. Schwab has been completly swamped - they are now being
>forced to accelerate an upgrade to their mainframe trading systems, and
>its redeploying people to man the phones in it's call centers. This is
>a pretty up-to-the-minute, tech-savvy place, but apparently no one saw
>this much coming this fast.
>
>Could this be yet another sign of a bursting bubble?
The bubble is still expanding. The Nasdaq traded 1.1 billion shares. Amazon.com was up 24 3/8 (15%); Yahoo, 70 7/8 (21%); Broadcast.com, 87 9/16 (44%). TheStreet.com's Internet index (DOT), which trades on the Philadelphia options exchange <http://quote.yahoo.com/q?s=^DOT&d=2b>, was up almost 18% today, is up almost 50% since last week, and has nearly doubled since its inception Dec 9.
I've never seen anything like it, but I'm not *that* old.
Doug