NASDAQ
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“Thou Shalt Not trade on Margin, or Drugs!”
~ God on The Ten Commandments
The NASDAQ was an invention by a group known as the NASD (or National Association of Stalinist Diplomats) who realised that the amount of paper being consumed on a daily basis at the stock exchange was far too high and thus set about stopping people from eating paper at the exchanges.
They did this with a view to improving fitness, however, with the advent of the electronic dealing system, Floor Traders were now no longer running around, surviving on a diet of old stock orders, and were instead buying fast food, which quickly demonstrated the law of unintended consequences - as many observed extremely fat people sat at computers at the exchange.
The NASD quickly decided to do something about this, and realised that the best thing to do was hide the problem and deny all knowledge; this was done by blowing up the exchange, and instead forcing people to trade over from the internet at their company office, which served not only to hide those unsightly beings from the NASDAQ site, but also opened up the whole system to trading around the world without the need to pay someone personally for the service of placing the order.
[edit] Result
Thanks to this revolutionary system, people began to perceive that computers were indeed the New Way and thus everybody set about using the NASDAQ to get hold of the stocks of companies that featured the word 'computer' or 'technology' in their business objectives.
This continued for quite a while, however, eventually, people began to tire of the lack of anything actually happening outside of the exchange, although many believe that this was directly the fault of Bill Gates and Microsoft, since many were convinced that the day when Windows stopped crashing would indeed be that breakthrough day.
Naturally, that never happened, and indeed each version of Windows appeared to be getting worse, despite the fact nobody seemed to realise that Microsoft was actually only a single company, although it could also be said that most of the other technology solutions were too a pile of crap and thus the dot-com bust happened, with many people who were blantantly unaware that the world was falling around their feet.
Since then, Microsoft finally released a version of Windows that didn't crash whenever you plugged a device into the computer (or simply turned it on), however, it naturally arrived too late to save the bust from happening, so all the pissed off investors decided to go back to basics, and buy gold.
This gold rally has now visited 560, and appears to be very similar to the dot-com bust, although currently the market is waiting for gold investors to realise that it's still just gold, and thus cause the collapse of yet another commodity.
[edit] Current Day
Currently, Archipelago has merged with the NYSE, bastardising the entire system by creating a half-human, half-computer system of trading, which is a nice way of preventing people from losing their jobs entirely, although fortunately, plans for a giant mouse-wheel dynamo are in place in order to keep the floor traders from going into redundancy, as they run and shout to keep the stock market system alive with electricity.
[edit] Interest Rates
Currently, the US economy is being hammered by the Fed continuously rising interest rates, however, most of the market participants (purely by coincidence) are informed of this at the inopportune moment when the majority of traders settle back for a nice relaxing smoke of Crack and are thus ignoring the news because they are too chilled to be worried.
This is becoming a concerning trend, with many traders using drugs to allegedly improve their performance in the market, with one man claiming that he can make $100,000 per Kitten - although some would say this is a definite exaggeration, but nonetheless, this evolving drug culture is becoming exceedingly worrying, with one man ending up on a Quack Candle after a position moved against him by 60% in what he believed was 30 seconds, due to having consumed a large amount of un-cut Cake, which caused a massive slowdown of his Shatner's Bassoon resulting in the perceived 30 seconds taking an actual total of 6 months, a clear indicator that such a trend is worrying.
