Old article published just days before Nasdaq peaked in March 2000.
Meet The New Market Makers They’re young, they’re rich, and they couldn’t care less about Graham & Dodd. But they’re the ones driving those insane tech stocks, and they’re not going away.
By Nelson D. Schwartz
February 21, 2000
There are about 20 minutes to go before the stock market closes, and I’m standing next to 24-year-old Adam Mesh in the sprawling offices of Tradescape, a Manhattan day-trading firm. “Hey, check out PLUG,” Mesh yells out. Overhead, on one of Tradescape’s ubiquitous TV monitors, CNBC’s Joe Kernen is talking up Plug Power, a fuel-cell company that Mesh and the other twentysomething traders here have never heard of before today.
On his multicolored computer screen, Mesh is watching PLUG, already up $15 to $53, suddenly begin to surge again. He jumps in, buying 500 shares at $55. About a minute later he gets out at $58. But PLUG is still soaring, so Mesh gets back in, this time at $60. I look around at the other traders squeezed shoulder to shoulder in Tradescape’s offices, and on every screen the ticker PLUG is flashing, its shares furiously moving higher.
“What the heck is this company?” I ask. “It’s PLUG,” Mesh says. Yeah, I know that much. But what does it do? “I don’t know,” Mesh responds, without looking up. “Power, I guess.” I decide to let the issue drop, and with PLUG now about to close at $79, the question of what the company does seems pretty irrelevant. In a rapid bout of buying and selling, Mesh trades nearly 10,000 shares of PLUG in the few minutes I stand behind his desk, making $20,000 in the process. It’s been a good day for Mesh, but for some traders it’s been even better. “I made a honey,” one guy calls out, using trader slang for $100,000. “Can you believe this?”