Good evening friends.
Today was an historic day on Wall Street. The Nasdaq Composite went over 5000 for the first time since March of 2000. Please take a walk back with me 15 years ago. This is the origin of why Sammy & Family went into Social Media in 2010.
After years of being an assistant trader, I had finally been at the right place at the right time. I traded a lot of technology stocks from 1995 to 1999 with one of the largest private companies on Wall Street. Now if you remember in the late 1990’s, the dot.com frenzy started and got so out of control that even Fed Chairman Greenspan warned of ” Irrational Exuberance”
Nonetheless the Nasdaq kept climbing feverishly in price through 1999 and all the way until March of 2000. Individual stocks were rallying 50 to 100 points a day. I was trading the craziest technology stocks through the biggest tech boom in history.
Friends at the end of this post there will be a link to a piece CBS did on me in September 30th, 2002. All of this ties into Sammy’s Family’s history and evolution. True story, as I am writing this I cannot believe the journey that has taken place. I really can’t.
By the 3rd quarter in 2000, just a few months later stocks were down 90 percent off their highs. People lost everything they had made through the 90’s and then some. There was blood in the streets. We called this crash in the 2nd half of 2000, ” The Tech Wreck” — From there we continued to slide into 2001, then came 9/11, and then the recession of 2002, then the war in Iraq in 2003, the Real Estate Boom of 2004-2007, then great Recession of 2008 and the banking crisis which put many banks out of business and many staggering for years, and the tech stocks throughout all of those swings remained very depressed. Stocks like Cisco and Microsoft did Not move in price for over 10 years, they literally went nowhere. In the past couple of years Social Media became mainstream and slowly but surely the easy money policy from the Federal Reserve lasting 5 years finally dragged up the technology stocks as well. So here we are today on March 2nd, 2015 right back where we were in March of 2000. Wow. Let me say that backwards. Wow.
I said to myself after the boom in my career, and the technology crash which destroyed it, the next time I saw a boom like i did in technology stocks, I didn’t just want to be a trader of those stocks and companies who can be wiped at any time anymore. I wanted to build something, something real. So in 2008 and 2009 when social media started heating up, before Facebook and Twitter went Public, I felt the same wave was going to take place that I saw in the late 90’s. At this point I had Sammy for 5 years already and was head over heals for him. I always had a kinship with animals, but Sammy changed my world. As i said in the story of “Sammy Loves The World” — People lit up like Christmas Trees every time they saw him and played with him. I totally related to that because i was feeling that all the time with Sammy. With all those moving parts eventually the GONG went off in my head. I decided to share those feelings about Sammy with people all over the world and I used social media to do it.
From Dot.com to #Hastag, The story of Everybody Loves Sammy and Dr. Harp Seal was born.
For the CBS article on me in September 2002, here you go; http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-return-of-the-day-trader/
