10 years ago
I bought my first stocks about 10 years ago. The first stock I think was John Fredriksen’s Northern Offshore (which later went bankrupt, and now has re-emerged).

I also remember trying to open an account in one of the first web based stock broker sites in Norway that was run by the Norwegian bank Kredittkassen. And I was rebuffed because I did not really have the money they required to open an account. Sure enough they only wanted customers who actually had some money to invest.

Now
Now times are different. It seems that everybody is in the stock market. I hear people talking about it on the news, and people talking stocks at lunch or at the post office.

I don’t think it is such a great buy signal when the whole population is in the markets. The masses will never become rich.

However the things happening is kind of the craziest I have seen. A lot of people are losing a lot of money right now. The stocks of the big boring norwegian half government controlled companies are suddenly hot daytrading stocks which goes up and down more than 10% a day.

Something good may come of all the pain. Maybe people will wake up and realize that this mixed economy thing is not such a great experiment after all. And maybe start demanding more pure liberalism and back to basic capitalism without government manipulation.

But in the short term the governments around the globe only have one tool and that is to patch it up as best they can when trouble arrives.