Touring Nasdaq, Sort Of

Nasdaq has been having some trouble lately, so I went down to see what I could do to help. This is easier for me than for most, since Nasdaq is actually located downstairs from my cubicle at work. The location came as a bit of a surprise to me, though it shouldn't have, I guess. Times Square, as symbol of the new New York City, is probably the best place to have the stock market that reflects the amazement of our fading prosperity.

You've probably seen Nasdaq's face. On the southeast corner of 43rd St. and Broadway, the Conde Nast building, there is a semicircular LED panel approximately eight stories high, wrapping around from the 43rd St. side to Broadway, that projects the Nasdaq ticker and advertisements for Nasdaq companies from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m., daily. The LED screen has windows cut out in it so that the Conde Nast editors inside can look out onto the Armed Forces recruiting booth and laugh simperingly. The screen is the largest LED panel in the world, and cost $20 million. All this, save the simpering, I learned from taking the lunchtime tour. What I did not learn on the tour, but knew previously, is that this electronic billboard is called "the can" by those who hate it.

The others on my tour had few reservations about the can. Besides the usual assortment of tourists eager to take in every attraction in Times Square, there were gathered a few who seemed to have just wandered in, shell-shocked from the outside turmoil and looking for fiscal sobriety. They would not find it here.

If the New York Stock Exchange increasingly reminds us of an obsolescent meat market, like Les Halles a hundred years ago, destined to be cleaned up and shipped off, then Nasdaq is like Space Camp. It's flashy and fun, but in a fake and puerile way. Doubly fake, in fact, because, as our tour guide Urizar Benjamin (or perhaps it was Urizar, Benjamin) told us, Nasdaq does not exist, or if it does, it doesn't in Times Square.

Nasdaq is an electronic stock exchange, so there is no trading floor, thus no traders, no bustle, nothing. Nasdaq is actually a collection of computers in Trumbull, CT. You cannot visit the computers. This did not deter one woman from asking, "Why not New Jersey?" She was countered by a woman from the great state of Connecticut who thought it was just fine that the computers were in Trumbull, given the excellent and recently completed industrial park. Urizar intervened, and we moved on through the Tunnel of Information, a domed intermediary hallway where banalities about the new economy were shouted at us in six languages.

It took a few minutes for the information to register, but I eventually realized that there was no stock market here. In fact, Urizar was proud to point out repeatedly, we were taking a tour of a promotional vehicle, Nasdaq MarketSite, whose purpose was to stimulate our enthusiasm for Nasdaq and the new economy. To this end, we were shown a short video envisioning what the IPO of the future will look like. Apparently, in just five years, we will all be wearing the clothes of 10 years ago. Also, the financial world will be highly racially integrated.

The presentation and I were both a little vague on the details, but it seems as though Nasdaq is preparing for the future by telling us how great the future will be. After we were shown the video, on a traditional projection screen, we walked under some zooming Who Wants to Be a Millionaire lights over to a few flat-screen plasma televisions, which Urizar assured us, despite their $10,000 price tags, would be in our homes in a couple of years. A few of my fellow tour-takers had been equally in awe of the short elevator ride that commenced our tour. Never underestimate the digital divide. In any case, this all struck me as a little odd, since Nasdaq does not make televisions. But somehow the causes of plasma screens and electronic marketplaces have united in that great utopian jumble called the frictionless future.

Finally we got to the part of the tour everyone was waiting for: the ol' simulated stock market game. The eager anticipation on everyone's faces reminded me of museum tours in elementary school. Our eyes would glaze over with edification and information, and then finally the replica armor and plastic swords would be brought out, and we'd have at it.

By this time, we were standing on a second-floor balcony that ringed the inside of the can. We were in front of individual monitors looking down onto the first floor, where a mass of screens stretched up for a couple of stories of a large atrium. Reporters for various television channels, including CNN and CNBC, were in front of the screens, making live broadcasts from Nasdaq, much the way their colleagues were simultaneously broadcasting from the trading floor of the NYSE. Many of the others on my tour recognized at least one of these reporters, and reacted to his presence as if he were a mid-level celebrity?hushed tones and a sense of shared camaraderie.

They were all quickly distracted by Urizar's explanation of the game we would now be allowed to play. On our individual monitors, we would be given $100,000 to invest in any of four companies over an accelerated, "random," five-year period in Nasdaq's history. By some amazing stroke of luck, I was given the years 1994 to 1999. My companies were Robert Mondavi, Whole Foods, Carmike Cinemas and Oracle. The first three were presumably assigned me to showcase the diversity of the stocks on the Nasdaq index. In other words, don't worry, we're not all tech stocks. The fourth was so I would get rich and happy. I mean, I don't know shit about stocks, but I do have the suspicion that Larry Ellison ended that five-year period a considerably wealthier man than he started. I invested all my money in Oracle, waited four minutes and had $347,577. Posterity does not record the performance of Carmike Cinemas, or at least this posterity doesn't.

All this boosterism was beginning to make me a little queasy. Nasdaq was up 17 points on the day I visited, but has just been getting killed for months now. Although Urizar said that when there was an IPO launch, food and champagne was served where the news readers were now standing, he did wryly admit that it had been months since that had happened. Right now it looks like the IPO of the future might be a long time coming, and in the meantime Nasdaq, instead of touting last year's new paradigm vision, should pipe down and start girding its loins for lean times.

At the end of the tour, I skipped my chance to get my picture taken and projected up on the can.