Click Go The Years

In two decades, the internet has revolutionised the way investors and companies do business.

- Greg Hoffman

I was sitting at a desk in the “millionaire’s factory” (Macquarie Bank) when Money magazine was first going to press 20 years ago. I was a handful of years into my career in finance and loves the fast-paced environment. Lunchtimes, evenings and weekends were spent studying and discussing finance and investment. It’s a wonder I have any friends left.

Early Monday evenings in the office several of us would wait at the end of the desk for Australia’s then most popular sharemarket newsletter, The Rivkin Report, to roll off the fax machine. The fax machine! A technology first commercialized in the 1960s.

We were also holding regular meetings about the “millennium bug”, or simply “Y2K”. There was the talk of planes falling out of the sky and other horror scenarios because the early days of computing had seen processing power at such a premium that a few shortcuts had been taken.

The year 2000 clicked over and it was pretty much a non-event. Yet the saga was a wake-up call to the way our society was becoming dominated by networked computer systems. The internet was expanding and fax machines were on their way out.

The trend was set and rapid technological change has influenced the business and investing landscapes ever since.

Back then I’d phone a stockbroker to buy shares. Today I still conduct more than half of my buying and selling on my phone but it’s via a smartphone app rather than speaking into a handset attached to a curly cord. And an improvement in the placing of orders on the sharemarket is only the beginning. Technology has impacted virtually every part of my investing process.

Buying an idea is the last step. Before that, I have to find and research it. Twenty years ago, this involved looking at a lot of hard copy annual reports and newspapers. Today, as for most investors, the majority of my research is conducted online.