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A L S O__T O D A Y Tools of the trade By Dana Blankenhorn New electronic networks like the Island are enabling the day-trading boom 21st Log Windows when-did-you-say-again?   T A B L E__T A L K Has your mind ever been changed by something you read on the Internet? Discuss the culture of online debate in Table Talk's Digital Culture area   Search for technology books, software and more at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     R E C E N T L Y Aliens blew up my garbage dump! By Andrew Leonard SimCity is back -- and managing municipal utilities has never been so much fun (02/03/99) First Amendment wins another round online By Janelle Brown Court rules against Net censorship bill (02/02/99) The resurrection of Golgotha By Howard Wen Volunteer programmers rescue a defunct company's software -- and produce a do-it-yourself tool for building 3-D games (02/01/99) The Web's identity crisis By Scott Rosenberg Intel's processor-I.D. gaffe shows how badly tech companies want to know who you are and where you live (01/29/99) The 21st Challenge No. 18: Microsoft antitrust haiku By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau What if lawyers argued in haiku form? (01/29/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DAY TRADERS They buy and sell at ultrasonic speeds. They rarely leave their desks. And they're obsessed with the Net. BY DANA BLANKENHORN | Trading hasn't even started on the NASDAQ, and Zak Roszman already looks sick. Roszman is 24, and spends his days at the Atlanta trading room of Capital Gains Inc., which offers traders technology in exchange for commissions. Right now he is slouched before two computer displays, a 20-inch and a 17-inch. He's wearing a baseball cap, sweat shirt and jeans, and he's got his feet stretched over a corner of the table, in one corner of a room filled with such tables. He looks like a bored kid in a classroom -- until I sit down with him, and see the fear in his eyes. It seems that during the previous week Roszman shorted Amazon.com at $150/share -- he bet that the stock would take a dive -- and the first trade on the bookseller today will be at $185. Just like that, he's down $35,000 and staring at the abyss. He dips some Skoal, then spits into a Styrofoam cup. "I probably do 25 to 30 trades a day," he says, often 1,000 shares at a time. "I usually leverage" -- borrowing against his stock to buy more and increase the profit potential. "When a trade goes wild like this one, that means a margin call." Margin calls force traders to put in cash on a losing position, or take the whole loss. Roszman shrugs, putting on a brave front. "I get margin calls all the time." A single Zak Roszman is just a lone gambler placing bets. But there are thousands of full-time traders like him, sitting in hundreds of "day trading rooms" around the country. And many thousands more traders are doing the same work from home, via modem. With a little capital, some hard work and the help of a recent technical revolution, the men at Capital Gains have been able to quit their old jobs to join the ranks of the "day traders." This new breed of stock traders controls much of the daily action on the technology-heavy NASDAQ market -- and they've become one of the driving forces behind today's wild fluctuations in Internet stock values. Day traders love technology stocks, in part, because technology is what made day trading possible: Internet brokerages reduced the cost of individual trades, new computerized trading tools put once-restricted market information into many more hands and the Net provided a ready channel for the kind of tips and rumors that fuel the rapid spikes and drops the day traders ride. But what motivates these desktop dealers, typically, is the same desire that has fired up gamblers and speculators in every previous gold rush: the wish to chuck a boring day job, make a fast fortune and retire in comfort. Day trading itself, though, turns out to be hard work: For many traders, it's a grueling day job in its own right -- one with no guaranteed salary but potentially handsome rewards. N E X T_ P A G E .|. Who the day traders are, what they make and how they work   ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM McCAULEY