Tech Influences Investing

Here in the early 2020’s, social media and apps offering free trades are reshaping the investment scene. Economist Robert Shiller in the Times sees it as deja vu all over again: "Early in the 1920s, people played the market as a grand game, abetted by technological innovation and new mass media.”

The high tech? The stock ticker. "In 1923 the Trans-Lux company came out with the 'movie ticker' — a large illuminated screen showing rapidly changing stock prices.” No longer were stocks dull certificates that rich uncles kept in their safe deposit boxes. Anyone could go to a brokerage and watch stock prices soar and dive in almost real time. The Money Game was on!

The new  media was radio. "The world entered homes electronically, giving people an immediate sense of the possibility of new technologies and access to a global narrative about financial success.”

From September, 1919 to September, 1929, Shiller estimates, stocks returned an inflation-adjusted average of 20 percent a year. After that.... 

With stocks having already returned an average of 12 percent, after inflation, over the ten years ending March 2021, it’s hard to believe investors have six or eight years of 20 percent returns to look forward to.  “We shouldn’t be surprised,” writes Shiller, "if uncomfortable feelings about the market grow to unmanageable proportions."