Depending on who you ask, going "all-out"-i.e., the wholesale exemption of dividends from federal taxation-is a stimulus package, an unconscionable sop to the rich or elegant tax-code reform. (My favorite contribution to this dialogue: According to Internet gold bug Adam Hamilton, the plan undoes the work of "liberal socialist thieves who have slithered into the Halls of Power in the United States like a plague of fiery serpents.") The slithery left is plaguing us, all right-with statistic after galling statistic meant to display how much the tax cut skews to the wealthy. "Two hundred and twenty thousand American taxpayers," Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz told the PBS NewsHour , "will get the same amount as 120 million people at the bottom."

The supply-sider comeback? They're too busy rejoicing to bother. The tax agitators on the trickle-down right have lived to see their dream President; they're tanned, fit and ready for a close-up. "We are going to cripple the entire Democratic leadership all at once," Grover Norquist, beside himself over the dividend plan, crowed to a New Republic reporter. "The Bush dividend tax cut will be the biggest event to hit the asset markets since the 1981 Reagan tax cuts," Larry Kudlow, chief talking head of the self-styled "pro-growth" right, promised the New York Post.

But the refrain in the financial press has been: Be careful what you wish for . In a sharply argued Heard on the Street column, Ken Brown pointed out that investors can be mindlessly trendy-and just as they demanded growth in the 90's, they "now believe that cash in the form of a dividend check is more valuable than a promise of future riches." Holding companies to a fixed schedule of cash payouts may discipline scheming managers, but it may also handcuff the good ones. The clamor for dividends effectively deprives companies of the more flexible option of the buyback-a de facto dividend that raises per-share earnings. I.B.M. used this tactic cunningly throughout the 90's, Mr. Brown points out, tacking back and forth between retaining earnings one year and rewarding shareholders the next. But once a dividend is in place, forget it: "companies are loath to cut [them]." Besides, adds former hedge-fund manager Andy Kessler, dividends- feh . "Dividends entice investors into debt-laden, slow- or no-growth companies," he wrote in a feisty Journal op-ed : "Who would we rather the stock market provide investment capital to, someone working on hydrogen fuel cells or dividend-paying electric utilities milking 30-year-old soot-belching power plants?"

What about the old classic, that the cut would end "double taxation" of dividends? In the left corner, Paul Krugman, idol of the bien pensant : "[L]ots of income faces double taxation …. [M]ost of us pay income and payroll taxes when we earn our salary, then pay sales taxes when we spend it." In the right corner, the Journal 's honorary Bushie, Holman Jenkins Jr., who believes the tax should be abolished at the corporate level: "Then it wouldn't [be] a tax cut that benefits taxpayers according to their tax bracket but one that puts equity squarely on the same footing as debt." Everyone, of course, agrees with The Financial Times ' donnish murmur, that "tax policy should be neutral. [It] should not distort behaviour by encouraging companies and consumers to favour one action over another." Because capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than dividends, companies have been encouraged to grow at all cost, behavior that may have contributed to the market bubble; and as interest payments are deductible, the tax code encourages debt over equity financing. But be careful what you wish for . "Neutrality" argues just as convincingly for raising the capital-gains tax to parity with ordinary income, or ending the deduction for interest payments. And to engineer a more truly neutral dividend tax cut, the administration would have to make it hopelessly complex.

Enter the unflappable Floyd Norris of The New York Times , who explained, "The most striking new addition to the pantheon of corporate finance … would be the 'deemed dividend.'" Effectively, retained earnings would now automatically be considered a "deemed" (or unpaid) dividend, thus raising the cost basis of shares and reducing any future capital gain should the shares be sold. Barron 's Alan Abelson drove home the point: "There's something paradoxical, even comical, about the administration's vowing to simplify the tax code even while it pushes what bids to be easily among the most complicated tax plans ever devised by the human mind."

But why be so pointy-headed? The idea behind the tax cut is simple enough. "See," explained the President, "by ending double taxation of dividends, we will increase the return on investing, which will draw more money into the markets to provide capital to build factories, to buy equipment, hire more people." Ah, be careful what you wish for . The legacy of Nasdaq 5,000 was capital overhang and an overleveraged consumer. The dividend tax cut, argues Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, is like refilling the punch bowl to avoid a hangover: The administration is resorting to "the same recipe that got America in trouble in the first place-hyping the stock market and the bubble-induced excesses it prompted in the real economy."

Which brings us back to Mr. Kudlow. Only two years ago, he assured The American Spectator that a "bandwidth revolution will come and the Internet will take over economic life," bringing in its wake Nasdaq 10,000. Now Mr. Kudlow has bet the house on what he terms a "new investor class" in America. As an editorial in The Economist from the 2000 election cycle explained, Mr. Kudlow has popularized the idea of a shareholder society, and that the doubling of the number of Americans owning mutual funds "could be one of the biggest social, as well as electoral, changes in America." After weeks of pounding the table on the CNBC show he shares with James Cramer, Mr. Kudlow has received much of the credit for shaping the President's thinking on dividend tax relief. Be careful what you wish for! Come the next election, the guy in Muncie with his odd-lot stake in the newly dividend-yielding Oracle may fancy himself a member of the new investor class. Or he may just think of himself as unemployed.

James Cramer completely mastered the art of noise.

Let's define our terms: "Noise" is the short-term movement in the price of a stock, a random fluctuation that has little or nothing to do with the real value of the underlying business. Mr. Cramer ran his successful hedge fund as a fast-buck trader, rarely holding onto positions for more than a few days. He's the anti–Warren Buffett: Instead of searching public companies for hidden value, Mr. Cramer played the tape, picking up on the little shifts in rhythm and mood that can signal the direction of market-set prices. "Part of our great strength," Mr. Cramer admits, "was the recognition that investing is almost all psychology and very little substance." Mr. Cramer gave stocks nicknames ("Fizzy" for Pfizer, "Mr. Softee" for Microsoft), then traded them-selling them, buying them back, selling them, buying them back-in furious slugs, day after day.

Noise has its aural as well as its statistical dimension: talking loudly and senselessly and at length on TV is noise, too. With the stock market evolving from national pastime to national mania, Mr. Cramer began to blanket the airwaves, appearing on Good Morning America , CNBC, Fox. Consider a typical Cramer day: waking up sometimes as early as 2 or 3 in the morning, trading overseas markets before dawn, reading 20 financial sections, penning a column for his start-up financial Web site, TheStreet.com, while getting pancaked up for his appearance on Good Morning America .

This omnipresence was meant to draw traffic to Mr. Cramer's Web site. Looking back on it, though, his emergence as the public face of Wall Street was a turning point. Encouraged by homespun buy-and-hold verities from Mr. Buffett, and some little-guy flattery from Peter Lynch, the 90's bull market began with prudence and husbandry and real value; it was a win-win contract with the nation's widows and orphans. But by the late 90's, with Cisco legging up to infinity and I.P.O.'s minting overnight billionaires, velocity had taken over. As a result, the two senses of noise converged: Say it , and it happens . Say Amazon.com is worth $400, and it shoots up to $400. As someone playing to a mass audience, then returning to his trading desk to play the dips and swerves of the market, the noise convergence gave Mr. Cramer enormous power. One question has dogged him throughout his career: Did he abuse this power?

In 1998, with the markets swooning precipitously and his fund facing, for the first time, total disaster, Mr.Cramerwentonlineand penned, virtually in real time, a column entitled "Get Out Now." The piece was posted on TheStreet.com, and almost immediately Mr. Cramer's fund began to buy, buy, buy. Well, Mr. Cramer was a notorious bull: He had minted money as an aggressive buyer-on-dips. By declaring the bull dead, did he help force capitulation and create a bottom to bounce off of?

Mr.Cramer has been investigatedbythe S.E.C. and various journalists-and alwaysvindicated. Earlier this year an ex-employee, NicholasMaier, wrote an incendiarybook, claiming that his bossroutinely cheatedinorderto achieve his eye-popping returns. In a nutshell, Mr. Maierclaimed that Mr. Cramer's shop operated as a nexus for non-publicinformationwhichMr. Cramer could then profit from: In exchange for outlandish commissions, brokers told him ahead of time what they would be upgrading and downgrading; journalists leaked market-moving stories before they were published. (Mr. Maier's credibility took a hit when a first printing had to be pulped after one particularly juicy accusation turned out to be false.) Mr. Cramer's book is an implicit rebuttal, but of a fascinating variety: He confesses to dancing right up to the line-but denies crossing it. "We became merchants of the buzz," he writes, "getting long stocks and then schmoozing with analysts …. We would work to get upgrades or downgrades because we knew cynically, that Wall Street was simply a promotion machine."

Repeatedly throughout his Confessions , it's Wall Street that's corrupt; Mr. Cramer is simply along for the ride. The most revealing chapters involve the I.P.O. for TheStreet.com, which Mr. Cramer started with Martin Peretz, publisher of The New Republic . "How could the markets be that stupid?" Mr. Cramer asks. "And would they stay stupid long enough for TheStreet.com to come public?" They did, though TheStreet.com eventually cratered, just like the rest.

Confessions of a Street Addict is a great, pummeling read, every bit as barbed, intense and unrelenting as its author. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Mr. Cramer was elected president of the The Harvard Crimson . He started out his professional life as a journalist. Though the hypermaniacal routine he cultivated as a Wall Streeter hardly allows for many contemplative asides (we rarely leave the confines of either Mr. Cramer's complex ego or his trading war room), his memoir is packed with good writing. His literary flourishes actually work, which is rare in a business book (Roger Ailes, for example, has "tungsten eyes" when he gets mad).

Who better than a man of contradictions, a wounded egomaniac blessed at once with a cast-iron constitution and an exquisite sensitivity to public image, to profit from the madness of crowds? A chippy, insecure kid from the working middle class of Philadelphia, he still draws a kind of competitive energy from his second-class status at college-though when in need, he never fails to call on his Harvard connections. An incorrigible narcissist, he repeatedly credits others with his success: principally his wife, herself a genuinely gifted trader, and his business partner, Jeff Berkowitz. Mr. Cramer is, by his own and Mr. Maier's account, a gruesome boss with a seemingly endless appetite for destruction (he smashes phones with startling regularity). Another confession: His financial career turned him into a narrowly focused obsessive and all-around bore. "Up until this year there wouldn't have been anything about me in my thumbnail [biography] that anyone could be proud of."

Thrilled as he is by the pissing contests on Wall Street, Mr. Cramer is haunted by the journalist he failed to become. His mother wanted him to be a writer, and his family seems confounded by the competitive fury that fuels his money-making. Until he retired, he was driven by the awful possibility that someone might ask him, "If you're so smart, why are you so poor?" How nice if we were heading, along with Mr. Cramer, into a decade driven by a different question: "How can an intelligent man making so much money be such a jackass?"

Stephen Metcalf writes for Slate , The New Republic and The Nation .

That's chump change in dot-com land, really, but other editors and writers around town took notice because Mr. Kansas wasn't some downtown digerati kid they didn't understand. Prior to joining TheStreet.com, Mr. Kansas was the senior financial markets reporter for The Wall Street Journal . Print business reporters and editors muttered to each other about that number: $9 million. That's a private sector payday. Mr. Kansas is a financial markets journalist.

Then came Salon.com in June 1999. David Talbot, who, prior to founding Salon.com in 1995 had been the arts and features editor of the San Francisco Examiner , took the Web site public in a lackluster initial public offering, and shazam!–he had $4 million in his brokerage account.

But those easy-money days are over. At current prices, Mr. Kansas' stock and options are worth $1.6 million, and Mr. Talbot's stake is worth a hair over $1 million. Not bad, but, of course, back in the old-media world, Dave Eggers just sold the paperback rights to his debut novel for $1.4 million.

After a wrenching week in the stock market, if reasons remain for editors and writers to get together and create on-line publications, the I.P.O. jackpot does not appear to be one of them. Sure, the Nasdaq perked up on Monday and Tuesday, but the clear losers of the Great Internet Shake-Up of April 2000 are those companies lumped into the category of "content."

The numbers are staggering. There's Salon.com, which, after closing at $10 a share in June, is now trading at around $2.50. In May 1999, a share of TheStreet.com finished its first day of trading at $60, but is now worth just about $7. And CBS Marketwatch, which hit $117 on its I.P.O. day, is now trading at less than $17. Those aren't the only ones: While the Bloomberg index of Internet companies is down 38 percent since the first of the year, the content companies it includes have lost 50 percent.

After Black Friday, April 14, Mr. Talbot still believes in his on-line publication Salon . It's just not a stock thing anymore.

"I don't have any visions of stratospheric stock prices," Mr. Talbot told Off the Record a couple of days after Black Friday. "Salon's business plan is a traditional one: We sell content and we sell advertising. We're not a B2B company or any other flavor of the month."

And as for selling a writing site as a hot Internet I.P.O., Mr. Talbot figures that's over. "I think it would be virtually impossible for a content company like ours to go public this year."

And Mr. Kansas said he's not having any trouble attracting talent away from old-line newspapers, even with TheStreet.com shares slumping. "I think journalists are attracted to the chance to have an impact," he said. "The chance to build stuff."

Eventually, money will be made by pumping out words and pictures for the Net, just as money has long been made by putting words and pictures on paper. Kurt Andersen and his partner Michael Hirschorn, co-founders of Powerful Media, a media and entertainment news Web site, stand to make much more money running their new enterprise, which meticulously tracks book deals and the hiring and firing of studio executives, than they ever would have made as editors at New York or Spin magazine.

Still, after April 14, you can't help but think that some of that dot-com mystique is gone. Hiring a bunch of writers and editors to produce a Web site is suddenly no longer the best way to get rich quick. And the business of filling computer screens with stuff people want to look at doesn't seem all that different from the business of filling movie screens, TV screens or newspaper pages.

Jerry Colonna, a managing partner at Flatiron Partners, the venture capital firm that put up the money for Powerful Media, as well as for the magazine and Web site The Industry Standard and for TheStreet.com, said he's confident his on-line media bets will pay off. "I structure my investments so that I can make money even if these companies don't get an Internet premium," Mr. Colonna said.

Breaking into venture capital jargon for measuring how many times an initial investment is multiplied, he added, "Instead of getting 15 times return, we'll get three times our investment. Well, that's not such a bad deal."

Massaging stock prices upwards, or at least attempting to, will no doubt continue to occupy new-media executives. Scott Kurnit, the chief executive of About.com, which hit its all-time high of $105.81 on March 14 before sinking below $30 this month, was confident that his company's stock would pick back up.

"I'll have to go to investors and say, Now that the dust has settled, we're different," Mr. Kurnit said.

He argued that his company, which gives people a cut of the site's ad revenue in exchange for running a home page dedicated to a specific topic like "cheese appetizers," didn't deserve the content label. "I don't like to be included in the content group because it's a misnomer; it means a lack of efficiency and not using the medium effectively. There are content companies and modified-content companies."

Louis Kanganis, chief financial officer of Nerve.com, said he was different, too. "I think what is going to start happening is that people are going to start separating new economy companies by the strength of their business plans," he said. Mr. Kanganis wouldn't rule out an I.P.O. for his company, which, in addition to its sex-theme Web site, now publishes a magazine and hosts a personals site, although he said Nerve might have to take the company into German rather than American markets.

Larry Kramer, chief executive of CBS Marketwatch, called the fall of Internet stocks "bittersweet." With the vision of blockbuster I.P.O.'s fading for those not yet in the on-line financial news game, he predicted venture capital funding would begin to dry up for his competitors. "I want to stop competing against people who are just throwing away money," Mr. Kramer said. "The dark side is that a lot of employees are in the sobering position of being underwater." In other words, all those journalists who signed on for the stock options are out of the money.

Of Mr. Kramer's own stock, which was worth $7.8 million on I.P.O. day and now is worth about $1 million, he said, "It wasn't real money, it was money to lose."

Sic transit gloria mundi.com.

Former Daily News editor in chief Debby Krenek bade farewell to her staff on April 13 at a party at the Water Club. About 100 people showed up, including ghosts of the Daily News past, including Jim Willse, editor and publisher when Robert Maxwell owned the paper and before Mortimer Zuckerman bought it in 1993; former star mob-world reporter Jerry Capeci, now a spokesman for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice; and former business editor Ann Podd, now a spot news editor at The Wall Street Journal.

"It's a pleasant group of people," said a Daily News staff member who attended. "It's sort of like a family that only gets together for a wake and says, 'Gee, we need to get together more often.'"

Ms. Krenek had stopped coming into the offices around the end of March. Her office remains dark as her successor Ed Kosner prepares to take the helm at the tabloid.

Perhaps more Daily News editors and reporters would have shown up if they hadn't had to pay $30 to get in. The gritty tabloid tends not to splurge for staff get-togethers; people who wanted to send off Mr. Capeci when he left the paper last October had to chip in for drinks and hors d'oeuvres, too. Also, perhaps they wouldn't have had to spend $30 if Mr. Zuckerman had shown up, but the paper's owner skipped the farewell ball for his "princess," as did Ms. Krenek's replacement, Mr. Kosner, who is close to wrapping up his six-week study of the paper before he starts making his mark at the News .

"I would say it was a bon voyage to somebody who is certainly going to be a big part of the news world," said a staff member who attended Ms. Krenek's party.

Oprah Winfrey's new 318-page magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine , is a very reasonable $2.95. After all, Time , Newsweek and New York are each $3.50. Plus, each issue of O includes a "gift from O " behind page 270: five "beautiful bookmarks" that can be cut out. But if you want to consider what you'll get, here it is:

"This Month's Mission," an activity for Ms. Winfrey's readers (page 20), is to start a "courage journal." First, buy a notebook. Then, "on the first page, write down every brave, strong, surprising thing you've ever done." Does starting a courage journal count?

For those who need inspiration, the Alaskan folk-singer Jewel shares what she writes in her own journal (page 96). In July 1999, she wrote, "My childhood was molded by the beauty of nature as well as the knowledge of how much people suffer. Even small indignities–dealing with stuff from petty bosses just to get a minimum-wage paycheck, answering intimate questions in the welfare offices (like whether you have a boyfriend who gives you money) just so you can get your children fed in the richest country in the world–they are the kinds of things that inspired my songwriting at 16. Does anyone believe in love?"

Of course, you don't need to buy a notebook to get started. In a feature "Something to Think About" (page 100), you are given space to write down your thoughts right then and there.

"Find a quiet spot to consider the questions below, then use the space to write down your thoughts." Questions include, "Am I satisfied with the life am living?" (four lines are provided for an answer); "How would I change my life if I had only one year to live? One month? One day?" (five lines); and "What's my heart's deepest desire?" (five lines).

Other activities include the "everyday pleasures" recommended by Katrina Kenison (beginning page 108): "Let your nose lead the way on a sensory walk. Take a friend with you and see what good sniffers you are. Can you tell which neighbor is barbecuing?" Also, "Look around the room you are in right now. What do you see that pleases your eyes and soothes the spirit?"

Whoa! I just saw Oprah's placid and serene gaze meeting mine!

Correction

The picture of Angelina Jolie and James Haven that ran in the April 17 edition of this column was published with an incorrect credit line attributing it to Dave Allocca of DMI. As was noted in the text, Gilles Bensimon, the creative director of Elle , was the photographer who captured the siblings smooching. Off the Record regrets the error.

"That guy" was working for an Internet startup, and his paper worth had recently soared into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The banker watched him cross the room. "If I hear about one more guy making that kind of money, I'm going to shoot myself," the banker said. He had a look of disgust on his face despite the fine caviar he was at that moment washing down with a sip of Champagne.

What a time we live in, when investment bankers whine about the rich without a trace of irony. The rich certainly are different from you and me, but I never thought I'd live to see them become different from investment bankers.

Recently, I found myself in conversation with three friends. Instead of trying to handicap the weekend's football games, they were talking about investments (they were all eager to invest in independent films), new homes and the millennium. They weighed their New Year's options: chartering a "private boat" in the Caribbean, renting an entire top-drawer restaurant in Manhattan or jetting off to Rome for a day or two. I'm going to a snowbound wedding in St. Paul, Minn.

This season of holiday excess and disparity brings out the bitterness in everyone. Everyone's rich except … everyone else. Just scratch the surface of a Manhattan evening and the same decadence that infected the late 1980's is there. Long lines on Thursday nights, no available cabs, friends with parties at Lutèce, drinks at Danube, weekends in Paris and London. Clever conversation now revolves around your interior designer, your dog walker and your new DVD-electronics setup. It all becomes a blur before dessert. Is this growing up or getting fat?

The new extravagance snuck up on us quietly. For a while there, it looked as though this decade's boom was all about inconspicuous consumption. Essentially, its subtext was that everyone was atoning for the wild days of the 1980's. In 1997, in the midst of a strong stock market, you could hop in a radio car and hear the driver moan about how things really roared in the 1980's.

But it's hard to keep all those dollars bottled up. Quiet chatter about diligent work has given way to smooth conversation about private jets and second homes.

Once again, the city is no longer shy about embracing wealth. Reminders of an earlier, more dangerous era are eerily prevalent. The Metropolitan Opera is premiering The Great Gatsby . The Talented Mr. Ripley , derivative of Gatsby , is on the big screen. And, of course, the stock market is feeling much like it did back in the 20's.

Most notably, the roaring 90's have captured a class previously unable to participate in the market's riches. The chattering class–the writers, the editors, the information professionals–finds itself in high demand. In an information economy, many of the information providers are getting rich, too.

Even an editor like myself finds himself trying to figure out what stock options are all about. It used to be we journalists could all safely talk about the rich with some distant disdain. Sure, the television types and the odd book author would manage to knock down a couple mil, but that group would inevitably move to the outside of the conversation, becoming a target like those who had "gone over to the other side" to become corporate flacks. Now, however, it's getting tougher to sort out the suffering scribe from the newly paper-rich journalist. Instead of meeting at the Blarney Stone, folks want to meet at the "21" Club or some other ossified place that charges too much for the same bourbon on ice.

I wonder how long the recent fire hose of happiness will continue dousing financial journalists. Someday, the argument goes, the stock market will tumble, the massive demand for financial writers will dissipate, and the journalists will retreat to their cool damp corners like roaches in a newly lighted room. Until then, journalists will continue to grumble about how all of this stock market cash isn't right. Journalists may be getting more dough, but they still enjoy carping about that half-empty glass.

I'm left thinking about the investment banker, my enriched journalist friend and the others finding stock in their stockings. I think what grinds me up is that in this time of peace and goodwill toward men, we're increasingly focusing on what others have that we don't.

It's a Christmas of unrequited greed, which is not what you'd expect in an era as flush as the 1990's. Maybe things will be different a thousand years from now.

Dave Kansas is editor in chief of TheStreet.com.

As the bull market rolls on, the old-media aristocracy (most recently, The New York Times Magazine , on Nov. 21) continues to obsess over the solitary obsessions of the day traders, as though this straggling lot of wired, manic investors holds the key to understanding the new age of money. You would think that the day traders, alone at home with their mousepads and their cute little Schwab accounts, have pushed us to the edge of some kind of national disaster.

It's a class thing. Day traders are considered low-rent losers, delusional suckers. So they get blamed for a market that seems to have lost its grounding in fiscal logic.

Well, the media establishment has it wrong. The term "day trader" is a convenient fiction, because most of the big institutions out there, the ones that move around huge chunks of money and make up the majority of the market, are day traders, too.

Day traders are not some exotic species, despite the media's best efforts to make them seem that way. The media should fess up: they know day traders, lots of them. But the ones they know are hedge-fund managers or other types of traders with cooler-sounding names: proprietary desk traders, for instance. These institutional traders move in and out of positions all day, too. The term day trader, in the current media parlance, is code for "hedge-fund manager without investors or a good college degree." Day traders have no backers among the chattering classes, because the chattering classes have decided to revere hedge-fund managers instead, though most hedge-fund managers do exactly what day traders do, just with other people's money and better institutional connections. Day traders are crack; hedge-fund managers are cocaine. Pick your poison.

Day traders have become the poster goons of all that's wrong with the stock market. They get suckered by two-bit promoters into a life of debt and solitude. They go on violent rampages. They ignore history and its lessons concerning the received wisdom of long-term investing. They work in spare bedrooms, in the company of skinny dogs and smelly hockey equipment. In short, they are the new barbarians.

But day traders make up a thin sliver of the market. There just aren't that many of them. Some estimates put their number in the low tens of thousands. They are really just pilotfish swimming alongside the great white shark.

Now, there are lots of people who have become do-it-yourself investors, who do their trading on line and make investment decisions a few times a quarter, maybe even a few times a month. This group numbers in the millions. You know these people. But, conveniently, the media (especially the old media) often uses a negligently broad stroke to lump just about everyone with an Internet connection and a brokerage account together and call them day traders.

It's not hard to see why. The old-media nobles, whether they like it or not, are complicit in preaching a very conservative world view of investing. On panel after panel, I hear personal finance journalists from dead-tree publications talking, with a pained tone in their voice, about the perils of day trading, with nary a word about the cowboys who dominate the trading desks of every major firm on Wall Street, placing billions at risk, or the aggressive mutual fund managers who attract thousands of clients. Most personal finance stories imply that you should entrust all of your money to professionals, invest for the long haul and avoid getting caught up in the excitement. Leave the excitement to the professionals. Whaddaya know, this is exactly what both Wall Street and the mutual fund complex want you to do. They want to take your chances for you-for a fee, of course. I'm sure it's all a terrible coincidence.

My view? Day trading is a wickedly hazardous occupation. I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't even recommend it. But the same goes for running a hedge fund or managing a mutual fund. I've watched friends flame out on those desks, skewered by the nasty nature of the trading game. It is not easy.

Risk is part of the stock-market business, whether you're talking about the day traders at home or the arbs at Goldman, Sachs & Company. Hedge funds blow up all the time. Last fall's spectacular mess at Long-Term Capital Management L.P. far outstrips anything day traders could pull off, even if they banded together. Yet the long-term gang continues to operate, having found flush saviors-and articulate defenders-in their time of need.

So the next time someone spits out the term day trader, spit it bright back at them.

Dave Kansas is the editor in chief of TheStreet.com .

Here's the pity: The money he's made isn't real. The Investment Challenge is a game. Participants_get $500,000 in fictional money and place fantasy trades. Whoever makes the most out of their half-million by Aug. 20 wins. (The winner gets to spend a day trading alongside James J. Cramer, the hedge fund manager whose column appears regularly in The Observer .) But the stocks are real, and the rules make the game a lot like the real thing. And Mr. Kupperman, who goes through a box of Lucky Charms every other day and carries a fake ID so he can get a drink when he goes out in Manhattan, really has no business being better at it than 9,100 people who do this for a living. After all,_he_doesn't_even know_what_the_ticker symbols stand for when he's making a trade._"I think_it's_better_that_I don't_know,"_he_explained._"If you_know what_it_is,_you_get_too attached to it."

He was in first place until late last month, when he went to Woodstock, missed two days (but left before Rome burned) and fell back into second place.

Four days later, Mr. Kupperman was back in faux-business in the dark den of his parents' house in Brookville, L.I. The shades were drawn, and the central air-conditioning was purring away. He was watching CNBC and listening to Limp Bizkit on the stereo. Empty boxes of Lucky Charms were scattered on the floor. And on his computer screen, a Big Charts stock scanner identified stocks that were on the move.

He made a trade. The ticker symbol was NTIA, the price was $22 a share. "I don't really know what the hell it is," he said. "I have no idea. But it hasn't really done anything, so I just sold it because I got bored of looking at it. And I'm short PKTR. I don't know what that is, either, but it just started moving again."

He trades like a banshee, making as many as 50 trades a day. As a momentum trader, he's a natural.

"I just figured when I grow up I need a job, you know?" he said. "It seems pretty interesting. I'd trade for real if I could get some money together. But I don't have any money to trade. That's my problem."

He wants someone to give him money, _money. He has a summer job-at the Broadway Mall in Hicksville, L.I., where he makes six bucks an hour. He was supposed to be at work on this particular afternoon, trying to persuade shoppers to fill out market research surveys. But it was a slow day at the mall, and he got a call telling him not to bother coming in. So he stayed home to mint his fantasy millions.

His father, an oral surgeon, is behind him all the way. He just persuaded his son to keep a notebook recording trades he would make if he had the money. In three weeks, he's up 20 percent in the notebook. "That isn't too bad," he said. "But I don't know-it's not as good as I'm doing in [TheStreet.com] competition. I usually make like 10 or 15 percent a day." The old man is boasting about his son to his neighbors and to his buddies at the Tam O'Shanter Golf Club in Glen Head, L.I. Now the golf buddies, many of whom are stock market professionals, are calling young Harris for stock tips. The kid is a star.

Too Young

Last summer, he worked for Representative Rick Lazio of Long Island ("the nicest guy," Harris said). But this summer, various Washington jobs fell through, and no one on Wall Street would take him. "I called all of them," he said. "J.P. Morgan, Citibank, anyone I could think of. They said, 'You're 18?' They laughed and hung up. I e-mailed them. They said, 'Send us your résumé,' and I'm like, 'Yeah, I sat home and watched the stock market for a couple of weeks.'"

The only people he knows on Wall Street are friends he made years ago when he was playing "Magic: The Gathering," the card game played by teenagers. Ranked in the top 20 worldwide, he traveled to tournaments and won some prize money. "A lot of my friends who were top-rated at Magic: The Gathering, they really became good at the stock market," he said. "I know a lot of them who said, 'Screw college,' and just started working as floor traders and market makers and stuff, and they usually pull in pretty good numbers."

He first learned to trade at Philips Academy_in_Andover,_Mass.,_the_boarding school that he graduated from in June. He said there were a half-dozen kids there who spent all of their free time trading stocks on computers in the school library. "They would just sit there at this one bank of computers and day trade all day," he said. "They did pretty well actually. They built up big stakes. I learned a lot of stuff from them."

But Mr. Kupperman didn't do any trading himself. He didn't have the cash. He didn't really fit in, either. People made fun of his Long Island accent. "I wasn't very impressed with Andover," he said. "I hated the people there, every last one of them. They were all really pretentious. A lot of them_were_out_to_sabotage_each_other. Everyone wanted to go to Harvard. That was their one goal in life. I didn't do too well there. I didn't play any sports. I got a varsity letter in track, but I didn't go to a single practice or meet. I don't know how I got that. They just gave it to me."

He got into Tulane University in New Orleans, and is headed there in the fall. Now he has just one month left in the last great summer, the summer before college. "Yeah, and I'm stuck on Long Island," he said. "There's nowhere to go. Me and my friends, we usually just get in a car and drive around from one side of the island to the other. We never end up doing anything useful. We just go to people's houses, pick people up, drop them off. Nothing fun ever happens. Or we go to the city and go to clubs-comedy clubs.

Curses! Foiled Again!

"We're gonna start doing nightclubs soon. But the bouncers get kind of cranky, because I'm only 18. I have a fake [photo] ID, but it doesn't always work. I got it in Times Square. Twenty-five bucks. Right after I got it, I went next door to pick up a pint, and the guy looks at the ID, looks at me and says, 'Look, you're wearing the same shirt.' I was like, 'Shit.' It hadn't even occurred to me."

He doesn't smoke pot or cigarettes. He doesn't have a girlfriend. He has seen American Pie twice and thinks it's the best movie ever. He wants to make a lot of money, then go_into_politics._"You need money to get into politics," he said. He's a Republican-"probably." He_thinks_he_might change his name someday. "Harris Kupperman: It's not Americanized enough," he said. He likes the name "John Wayne."

These thoughts occurred to him as he sat in the gloom of the family den, trading stocks he knows nothing about. He poured himself a handful of Lucky Charms. "I go through a box of Lucky Charms every other day. Can't be good for me. I was telling my friend last night: I think I'm gaining a bunch of weight, just sitting at home day trading. Until this summer I could eat a dozen doughnuts a day and never have a problem."

He made another trade, bringing in some of the PKTR stock he'd been short, meaning he was giving up on his bet that the stock would go down. The stock started going down immediately. "Great," he said. "Just lost a point on that. I've lost like $20,000 today."

It was the middle of the day, in the middle of summer. The market was quiet. He was losing interest, losing ground.

"My little brother's around here somewhere," he said. "He wants me to play Stratego with him. If the market stays boring, I might just do that instead."