From the day our world forever changed. https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/terrorist-attack-on-world-trade-center-ny.2170/
The oldest available stored snapshot of ET in the waybackmachine ( https://web.archive.org/ ) is from February 12th, 1998. https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://elitetrader.com:80/ You can select by date what version of the forum you want to see. Have fun going through all the archived versions!
Thx HobbyTrading, this is supercool ! This was before I even knew what stocks and brokers are, it is cool to hopp back in time and see how it was back then ! Loool, netscape navigator ? Nasdaq Level 2 Tutorial !!!
I had heard of The Wayback Machine but never used it. Thats pretty cool. I picked one random year (1999) and one random day and thread. This guy (Spacegold) lol.... wonder how he is doing today. "Amazon has been the dreamchild of this irrationally inflated boom, and it took the first steps yesterday and today toward going back to being the $12 stock that it really is. And others fell in line. The idea of a multi-billion dollar market cap not believing it will show one cent of profit for at least two years is starting to sink into the skulls of some of the more astute investors. Bank of Boston, possibly holding a hoard of Amazon shares that they paid too much for, is reportedly telling their clients to hang on, the setback is temporary. Not to panic". Looks like the Bank of Boston got it right.
A lot of water has gone under the ET bridge over the years. In the beginning Baron sold multimonitor video cards through the site. Most threads concerned tech issues or order handling. There have been some memorable posters. Anyone else recall Hitman, the arrogant daytrader who thought he could boss Baron around (he found out it didn't work that way), Praetorian(early GOOG buyer), def ( best employee IB ever had, he would go to bat for us from HK), Don Bright (Vegas prop firm owner, great guy RIP), Pabst (Chi-town bond trader), Jack Hershey (crazed genius), Spytrader (acolyte of Jack Hershey), MRMARKET("Bring me your finest meats and cheeses", $$MRMARKET$$ is HUGE, never a losing trade), it's a long list of great guys, some of whom could actually trade. The two guys who stand out are Jack Hershey and MRMARKET. One, Jack, was serious but impenetrable. The other, MM, aka Big Ernie, was a non-stop laugh riot. The single best chart trader I recall was Seanote. It was like his data feed was five minutes ahead of everybody else's. Great guy too, who started a bond firm after markets dried up post 9/11. The best time was the late '90's. Everyone was making money hand over fist. The big joke was that normies would call into work "rich", instead of sick. Changes in the regulatory and exchange environment had made stock daytrading viable and the bull market made it profitable. People may tell you they made money in the Great Crash. Few actually did. Lot of people blew up or decided trading was not for them. Looking back, one thing is clear. We need more big personalities here again.
I recall 'Cold' (but he had scores of aliases, a new one every week) who couldn't help slamming JH ruthlesly. Poor Baron somehow couldn't shut him down, LOL. That guy had a large chip on his shoulder because he had been a JH disciple at one stage but became disillusioned. He was a big character on ET at the time. He finally became annoying, but was at times funny as hell.
Now I feel old, realizing 2008 is ten years ago. Below is my journal for that year (Taking 103K to 1.2 million by year end 2008: https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/taking-103k-to-1-2million-by-year-end-2008.114087/ The volatility that year was good to me.
Jack had a knack for getting under people's skin. He made outrageous claims and mocked people. The funny thing is, I think there was some merit to his elaborate stock trading methodology. The futures trading system, IDK. I think Spydertrader put a lot of effort into it and could never really confirm the claimed results.