R E C E N T L Y Baby bulls By Heather Chaplin Young turks ride high on the booming stock market (04/15/98) Greener pastures By Jenn Shreve Out of the growing glut of finance mags, one zine is poised to capture the expanding market of young investors (04/15/98) The Quicken and the deadbeat By Andrew Leonard How Intuit and Microsoft are saving us all from bankruptcy and crushing personal debt. Or not (04/09/98) The Minor league By Tom McNichol Can Halsey Minor's "user-driven" publishing empire, CNET, make him the Internet's Ted Turner? (03/13/98) Top 10 new jobs for 2002 By Wendy Grossman Bot therapist, anyone? (01/05/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Money archives		from red to Green How the daughter of an anarchist, raised on a diet of tax-the-rich, fell in love with the business pages and can't get enough of those IPOs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BY HEATHER CHAPLIN There are some things I'll never tell my parents, no matter how old I get. I will never tell them what my sex life is like or that I buy new socks rather than wash the old ones. I will never tell them about vomiting on their bedroom carpet in high school, about smoking cigarettes in their basement or that I invested $2,000 in a pharmaceutical company the summer before last. Especially on the last point, my lips are sealed. I tried to broach the subject with my brother, and he turned a shade paler and asked me in a low voice how it felt to be part of a company that charged so much for its drugs that many patients in dire need of treatment couldn't afford them. At that moment, it didn't feel too good. I started to tell him the one about pharmaceutical companies pouring millions into the research and development of drugs, most of which never made it to market, thus necessitating huge markups on the successful products in order to stay solvent. Or had he heard the one about how pharmaceutical companies develop drugs that save lives, so we shouldn't begrudge them a little profit? Both rationales had sounded reasonable when I signed the check over to my stockbroker. But somehow, face to face with my brother, my reasoning deflated like a balloon with a knitting needle run through it. I'm a shameful person, I thought, and the next morning it was with significantly less joy than usual that I pulled the business section from my paper and scanned the stock quotes. There it was, and I must confess my heart leapt. The stock I'd bought at $58 was now selling at $136. Could such a profit really be so wrong? My brother and I were raised by an anarchist and a bohemian. We grew up on brown rice, soy sauce and a steady diet of tax the rich and feed the poor. Heroes in our household were Noam Chomsky, Paul Robeson, Emma Goldman and Buckminster Fuller. We were dragged to dinners with Pete Seeger, marches with labor unionists and no-nukers and parties where small talk leaned more toward ending the era of oppression than the pros and cons of variable interest rates. Oh, where did we go wrong, they wail. Because here I am, having done the unthinkable. I have become a capitalist, albeit a reluctant one. My poor grandfather would hide his head in shame. He worked for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union all his life, and he's buried in the Workers Circle cemetery in Baltimore -- a resting spot in which, I've feared on more than one occasion, he's no longer lying comfortably. I didn't mean for it to happen, Grandpa, I really didn't. After college -- the idea of making a living as a writer seeming far-fetched at best -- I toyed with the idea of becoming a labor lawyer. A five-month stint in a legal aid office quickly rid me of that notion, and I turned to women's health. Six months in an abortion clinic and I was close to committing myself. Desperate, with coffee counters looming large before me, I applied for a job as a researcher at a business newspaper. God knows why, but they gave me the job. I laughed when I told people about it and rolled my eyes at parties when it came up. It's just to pay the rent, I assured friends and relatives, it's just to get a foot in the journalism door. But something went wrong. I became enthralled: IPOs, P/Es, market share, global strategy, stock options -- it was like a potboiler, filled with drama, intrigue and plot twists. Now, I subscribe to Fortune and Forbes and I always start my day with the Wall Street Journal, fascinated, thrilled and appalled by the numbers floating through its pages: quarterly earnings, staggering CEO salaries, mergers worth billions. I find it hard not to be spellbound by the incredible marshaling of capital and power required for the seemingly endless generation of that kind of wealth. And here I am now, explaining business to friends, giving out stock advice and pontificating on corporate profits as if I'd been born to the calling. On the other hand, I also subscribe to Harpers, Z magazine and the Baffler. I read the Nation and I am equally fascinated, thrilled and appalled to learn what kind of havoc these very corporations are wreaking in every corner of the planet. So, am I schizophrenic? Pathetically acting out against the ideals of my parents? Desperately trying to be a rebel child of rebel parents? Plain old spineless? I prefer to think of myself as conflicted. And I suspect that I am not alone. I can't be the only 20-something reading those rapidly proliferating magazines dedicated to business, finance and money matters that seem to be taking over my local newsstand. They may not readily admit it, but I'm sure that some of my neighbors are part of that American majority who now invest more in stocks than in their homes. At the same time, am I really the only one suffering pangs of regret when I see the meager annual returns my socially responsible fund brings me? It's been a struggle, but I am coming to terms with my secret money obsession, and I can say for the most part, I have put my guilt behind me. What I can't say is that I won't one day leave it all behind for the life of a union organizer. Of course, it would help if I could cash out at the top of the stock market boom. SALON | May 15, 1998 This is the first in a series of biweekly columns by Heather Chaplin, a business and freelance writer in San Francisco. Chaplin last wrote for Salon on the Gen-X "baby bull" investors making a killing on the stock market.