For Thursday, April 22, 1999 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 724 words

Catch a bull at four

O.K., so the stock market has become my latest academic obsession. I am now Stock Boy, Market Man, or perhaps the Share Bear.

Readers will get a break from rafting and backpacking stories. Instead, they can watch me either beat the system or get pummeled into submission as I lead the way across the mine field of infantile investing.

I'm not certain what triggered my interest in the market. Perhaps it is a side effect of the Empty Nest Syndrome. It's suddenly like, "Hey, what's all this green stuff sticking out of my pockets? Money? What does it do? It grows? It can be planted as well as eaten? Eat the leaves and plant the seeds? Cool."

Along with that personal priming came the last few years of Internet Investment Madness. Soaring technology stock prices kept strutting across the anchor desks of prime time news. The more I heard, the more curious I became.

Why I didn't get involved years ago, I'll never know. I remember when Bill Gates left IBM's PC-DOS project and started MS-DOS. Kick me. I recall the debut of Intel's 8088 chip, the birth of Yahoo and AOL. A couple hundred dollars invested back then would have netted me a small fortune today. Ah, spilt milk, how gritty your taste.

Another reason for my obsession is that my wife and I just transferred our tax-deferred life savings out of a safe, snail-paced annuity fund and into the quicker more volatile world of mutual funds. All my little greenback babies are out running in the street (Wall Street that is). That has caused me to sit up and take notice.

I just got off the phone with my teacher buddy Kent Higginbotham. He teaches investment strategies to his students. He gives me advice, too. He said, "Steve, I got into the stock market in my early twenties. Now, I'm 29, and thanks to Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, I own my own townhouse and my own car. I say go for it."

So, here I am, devouring books, slogging through web sites, reading corporate financial reports, comparing mutual funds, comparing mutual index funds to straight stock purchases, at age 45, trying to catch up, and discovering that I have years of study ahead of me.

Presently, I'm too inexperienced to give advice. How audacious it would be of me to even offer it. If any slips out unintentionally, don't listen to it. What I can do is describe what it feels like to be a new investor and share the approach I'm taking, for better or worse.

First thing I did: I "played" the market. I signed up for the free online game at E-Trade that gives each player $100,000 and free reign to buy and sell stock. Each game lasts one month, then starts over. In the March game, I created a scattershot portfolio, picking mostly technology stocks. I didn't do much research. Instead, I just bought stocks I was curious about so I could follow them. I made $4,000.

In the April game, I took more time. I researched my companies, followed inspired hunches, and so far have dropped $4,000.

What happened? Was it me or the market? Many tech stocks tumbled this month. I didn't want to learn the wrong lesson, so I withheld judgment and continued my research. I decided I needed a strategy, not just a handful of lucky stocks.

It was then that I caught the flu and found myself in bed with David and Tom Gardner, the funny, young tycoons who wrote The Motley Fool Investment Guide. For a week I poured over their strategies and advice.

These Fools keep public portfolios of their investments at fool.com (AOL Keyword: FOOL). They notify visitors a week in advance before buying or selling anything and why. Their Foolish portfolios have for years consistently beaten the market by wide margins, averaging 25-percent a year. Since 1994 their "Foolish 4" portfolio, consisting of four high-yield DOW stocks, has turned $50,000 into $820,000.

It's only one book. I intend to read more. However, their Foolish advice rings true to me, and I will continue to reread their book until I understand it.

Thus far, I've been in the market for one week with $2,000 invested in two stocks (FDX, QWST). I'm ahead today for the first time, a whopping $21.