Diary of a future annuitant (32)

Another year is drawing to a close. It makes me think that I'm about to celebrate 15 years as an investor. I can still see myself excitedly opening an account with my first online broker. It was a great revolution at the time, not only for me, but for all individual investors who wanted to get into the stock market without going through their traditional banker.

There was definitely something magical going on back then. You'd connect an analog 56k modem to your phone line. The modem emitted characteristic sounds that only those born in the 20th century can know. For a moment, it felt as if we were taking Matthew Broderick's place in War Games. After a few seconds of waiting, we were connected, if all went well, which was far from obvious.

Then came the fateful moment when, with eyes full of hope, we opened the Netscape application, the first commercial Internet browser for the general public. Yes, the Web already existed before Internet Explorer... We connected to Webcrawler, the search engine of the time. Google didn't exist either... Incredible to think that just one generation ago, we were already surfing the Net, but without Internet Explorer and without Google... What will it be like in twenty years' time? Will today's giants still be around, or will they suffer the same fate as Netscape or Webcrawler?

In the end, nothing has changed that much. The web is certainly more user-friendly, but there's also a lot more nonsense, false information and swindlers of all kinds. Our machines are faster, but applications are also more demanding, and in the end we're still doing the same thing: logging on to a browser, passing through a search engine and trying to find the information we need. The names of service providers have changed, some brokers have disappeared and, above all... ABOVE ALL..: shares are as expensive as they used to be!

In this world that moves at 100km/h, if we just take the time to stop for a moment, we realize that in the end, after many detours, we've just been treading water. We haven't really invented anything new. Towers have collapsed, major market players have gone bankrupt, governments have gone broke, politicians have stirred up a lot of air, and we're back to square one. Some even went straight to prison, to use the analogy of the most famous gambling game.