Running the markets
Sally's World, November 6, 2002
www.worldwit.org

By SALLY DUROS

It's a sunny, chilly 40 degrees and 8:00 in the morning on a Sunday, and I am standing on a corner in Chicago's Old Town, jumping from foot to foot, and even dancing a little. I am amazed that it is so cold, and that I am out of bed. The sun is barely up, and still, I have this big dopey grin on my face!

A happy spectacle is streaming past: thousands of men and women in states of undress and jogging clothes, wearing silly hats, funny yarn wigs and comic capes, pulling balloons. It's Oct. 13 and these thousands are committed to making their best possible time running 26.2 miles in the LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon. As amazing as the runners are, I am moved beyond speech by the thousands of people affiliated and not affiliated standing on the sidelines cheering the runners on.

The runners and the onlookers are working together beautifully.
This early in the day, at the nine mile mark, the runners are still looking fresh, and they are polite and say, "Thank you." as they run by, accepting cold cups of water and Gatorade from volunteers. The street is littered with the crushed cups and the fingers of the volunteers are stiff with the wet cold, but everyone is smiling and laughing and cowbells are ringing and someone is piping great dance music out on to the street. And we are - all of us - in the groove, in the zone, and we are getting down!

The woman to my right yells, "Keep running, Mad Dog!" to a runner wearing a tee-short labeled "Mad Dog Nancy." And the woman to my left says to her three children, "I will give each of you a dollar when you spot Daddy." A woman behind me yells, "Go! Go - Fred. Yeah, Fred." And Fred, his t-shirt says Fred, - middle aged, gray and in fine form - trots from the center of the running crowd and gives her a high five. She beams. He beams. It is love, and then it is over. And he trots back to be swallowed by the stream that shows no sign of thinning or ebbing or letting up.

And I am - quite simply - beside myself. "My heart is full like a baked potato!" to quote the creative geniuses who bring us South Park.

And I wonder, "What is it about cheering from the sidelines that gives us so much joy?" And with some odd twist of mind, this event associates to another favorite spectator sport - watching the advance and retreat of the Dow Jones Industrial Index (DJIA)and the S&P and for the past few years, the NASD, as it is affectionately known.

The Dow, and its cousins, the utilities and transportation indices, are old friends of mine. It was another lifetime, before Ronald Reagan was president, before CD players replaced turntables, when personal PCs were still rare, and the Berlin Wall stood strong. The Dow had finally crossed 1000 only to usher in a recession, and sink back to the 800s. I was a copy reader at The Wall St. Journal, and one of my tasks was to cut an itsy bitsy bit of printer's rule, and using a razor-edged knife, place the hatch mark at just the right spot to show the close that day of the market's key indices.

The Wall St. Journal was a sea of gray type those days - with an occasional bar chart or earnings table to add humor and interest. If you really wanted a guffaw, you paged directly to "Salt and Pepper" - or better yet, read the editorials. What was to some keen insight was to others the equivalent of cocktail napkin humor.

The Wall St. Journal fit well the Big Daddy image of businesses of that time - dependable, conservative, and oh yes, male. While I worked there, The WSJ became the largest circulation newspaper in the world. Its huge subscriber base crossed lines of nations and expressed the manifest destiny of the markets. But it was not a newspaper that a "regular" person would read. It was too dry and specialized and settled in its way of talking about things. Shareholder meetings - yawn!

That all began to change in the 80s with the revolution that ended corporate pension funds and created Individual retirement accounts. Before we knew it, those of us on corporate payrolls became individual investors. And then in another blink, with downsizing and rightsizing and wrong sizing of the 90s - we flew out of corporations by the thousands toting nascent nest eggs that we could self invest if we so desired using other new tools - like internet brokerage accounts and index funds and high-growth mutual funds And those of us too young for next eggs were simply geared toward investment in a way that previous generations had never been.

This all contributed to our national preoccupation with the march of the markets and its commensurate run-up, the most impressive in all recorded history. The Dow climbed to an unprecedented 11,722.98 in January 2000, according to Dow Jones, only 13 years after it had first reached 2000, which had taken the Dow a prior 90 years to achieve.

A colleague said to me recently, "We were all drinking the kool-aid." Or maybe we had all really inhaled. We thought, hoped, dreamed that the markets could only go up, up, up. Who cared what kind of salary you were pulling down when your portfolio was going up like that!

But then the inevitable happened. Today in late October 2002, the DJIA is hovering in the 8,000s. So, we may be watching the market indices as a curiosity, but mom and pop joe investor is looking closer to home to get financially grounded.

The wise investor is tuning antennae to business values not necessarily coupled with the indices. Although the Global Village has been formative on where we are today, we are looking for comfort in tangible, observable products and services available in our neighborhoods, around the block and up the street. If your town is like my town, small business is holding steady while the multinationals founder.

"Watching indices gives you a very broad-brushed picture of what is happening in the economy, " said Andrew Keyt, executive director of the Loyola University Family Business Center of Loyola's Business School.
"(You) need to be looking at indicators from a strategic planning standpoint - what are the economics of your industry first and foremost. And then what are the economics of your local environment and how is that interacting with you customers."

"You need to be looking at local indices and local issues and working with your local government."

Family-owned businesses and small business are in a holding pattern, Keyt said. "They are not making huge investments, but they are not slashing and burning." He said. "They are taking a long-term perspective and waiting for things to settle down. The economy is at a transition point and people are waiting to see which way it is going. Many political and social forces are in play and affecting that."

During the past decade, small business' share of the private economy has increased to 52 percent, so the state of small business has a huge impact on how prosperous we feel.

When we use the services and buy the products of small and family-owned businesses in our communities, it's a lot like participating in the marathon. At some point, runners and onlookers merge into one experience. The "us" and the "them" disappear. We become one in a way that is tangible and real and immediate.

I believe that if we can all collectively direct our energy into that flow we can get through whatever our friends, the market indices, bring. It's a beautiful thing!

As it is, a friend of mine beat his own record in the Chicago Marathon by 4 minutes at 4:44:00, and he couldn't have been more proud had he been England's Paula Radcliffe, who set a world record of 2:17:18 to win the Chicago marathon.

And I get a picture in my mind of this cute guy who walked by me at the marathon. He is wearing a tee-shirt silk-screened with a photo of a generic-gendered, wide-eyed infant. The baby is looking right at the camera, smiling wide and toothless bright. And underneath is a caption in large block letters. It says, "Go, Mommy!"

Yeah, OK, I'm getting a little misty here…

And I am cheering him on and the baby on and the mom on. Each of us, even those last out of the gate, is going to make his or her best time. Collectively we are doing swell.

And we are all working together, and no glitch is going to stop us because we are in the flow.

And it is grand.