The Arrogant Ascent to 10,000

        By JOSEPH NOCERA
 

            NORTHAMPTON, Mass -- With the Dow Jones industrial average on the verge of closing over
            10,000, I can't get my mind off a strange stock picker known as Tokyo Joe.

        Tokyo Joe -- a.k.a. TokyoMex, a.k.a. Joe Park -- is a 40-year-old South Korean immigrant who,
        according to a recent article in Money magazine, used to run a string of burrito restaurants in Manhattan.

        A few years ago, he became obsessed with the stock chat boards on the Internet. On several of them, he
        became a dominant figure; other investors began investing in small-cap stocks on his say-so.

        Soon he had gravitated to day trading, where he claimed to be making a small fortune buying in and out
        of stocks in the space of a day -- or more likely, an hour. Finally, Tokyo Joe set up a proprietary Web
        site, where he charges $100 a month for access to his stock picks. He is, without question, one of the
        most influential stock pickers on the Internet.

        Sixteen years into the greatest bull market in American history, it no longer surprises when an amateur
        investor like Tokyo Joe decides to "go pro." No, the real twist here is his investing philosophy.

        He believes that company fundamentals, which have guided investors from time immemorial, are for
        saps, and that long-term investing is for losers. (He proudly calls himself a "speculator.") He thinks
        there's nothing wrong with touting a stock to make it move, and then selling into the run-up.

        ("Otherwise what am I? A charity?") And he thinks that if you have a problem with any of this, well, too
        bad.

        "We're the new blood, man," he exulted to the writer from Money.

        Here's the sad part.

        He might be right.

        Just check out the chat boards these days.

        They're filled with people who are day trading and speculating and trying to pump up stocks for a quick
        and easy gain.

        And to me, they suggest what is truly significant about Dow 10,000.

        It is not merely that this is the latest, greatest milestone in this astonishing bull market.

        It is that, unlike 1987 when the Dow Jones average hit 2,000, or even 1995, when it breached the 5,000
        barrier, the stock market in 1999 has become a different kind of place, populated by a different kind of
        investor.

        At the heart of this change is the Internet. Without question, the new medium has "empowered" investors
        -- offering them tools that have put them on a more equal footing with the smart money boys on Wall
        Street. The proliferation of cheap on-line trading has made it easy for investors to make their own
        instantaneous buy-and-sell decisions, instead of having to rely on brokers.

        And on, and on.

        But along with this empowerment has come an extraordinary bullishness that borders on arrogance.

        In the view of many Internet investors, stocks move up because, well -- who cares why they move up?
        That's what they've always done.

        That's the natural order of things. It doesn't matter that many of their favorite stocks -- Internet stocks
        especially -- don't have earnings or well-tested business models.

        That old-fashioned stuff is for fuddy-duddies, people who are out of touch with this wondrous new stock
        market.

        As it happens, I'm one of those fuddy-duddies.

        So is my friend Herb Greenberg, who last year left his job as a stock columnist at The San Francisco
        Chronicle to join TheStreet.com, a Web site that reports on the stock market (and of which The New
        York Times Company is the third-largest shareholder). Herb's stock in trade are stories that look closely
        at things like phony earnings and accounting gimmickry -- and at the kind of fundamentals that used to
        matter. But in bringing his kind of skeptical reporting to the Web, he's gotten nothing but grief. "I feel
        like I'm whistling in the wind," he told me recently.

        That's how I feel, too.

        But I also feel unnerved by what's happened in the market in the past few years.

        To me, when a character like Tokyo Joe arrives on the scene, it's a sure signal that the end of the bull
        market is near. But I'm not sure I have the nerve to say that out loud anymore.

        I've been burned too many times these past few years. It's tough to believe in fundamentals when the
        market no longer seems to care.

        Joseph Nocera is an editor at large at Fortune magazine.