A Teenage Stockbroker

Announcer: Riding the stock market often feels like this. Many Americans get off that roller coaster. Not Dan Abramson. He's a very wealthy 17-year-old thanks to the NASDAQ market.

Dan: This is my own personal Mecca here right now. This is the place where all the magic happens.

Announcer: This is Dan's first trip to NASDAQ's New York exchange. Dan has traded stock here from his West Hartford, Connecticut, home since he was eleven years old. Before the spring 2000 market crash, Dan thought he was invincible.

Dan: Sometimes I think that there is nobody better out there at picking stocks than me. I consistently pick winners.

Announcer: Four months later, many of Dan's stocks plunged.

Dan: We have Cisco down here, Amazon.com down, see it shows what an idiot I can be.

Announcer: Well, a rich idiot. Dan met one of his CNBC idols, Tom Costello. Tom seemed just as impressed to see Dan.

Dan: Nice to meet you.

Tom: Hi Dan. Nice to meet you. I hear you're a millionaire. Can you spare a dime? So you started investing when you were how old?

Dan: I was 10 and a half, eleven years old. So yeah I got the early start. Look at me, I'm seventeen, I've six years of experience. That's not something everybody can say, so...

Tom: But you've also been fortunate. You've ridden the biggest bull market in US history.

Dan: Oh yeah... Digital Island? I told my grandmother to buy it too.

Announcer: By the way, Dan is still in high school. His not-so-frequently updated Website, Stockrebel.com, touts Dan's tech-stock picks. Even with a market crash, Dan is still wealthier than adults twice his age. But about that Website, financial columnist Jane Bryant Quinn wonders why Dan didn't publish all his wins and losses.

Jane: You are not disclosing. You are making claims without proving it.

Dan: I suppose I should put an update saying, you know, I am alive. I haven't run to an island. Not cowering in the corner.

Jane: Would you look in these baby blues, do I look skeptical?

Announcer: Actually, Dan's not hiding anything. He's too busy being a teenager. The rest of us can't or probably shouldn't put all our eggs into Dan's tech stock basket. So far, Dan's survived this wild market ride. He's still flush with profit. And says when his NASDAQ wall of shame bounces back, he may actually spend some of the cash he's earned since he started this at eleven years old.

Dan: If it keeps going up from here, you know, maybe I can buy that little house in Malibu, by the time I'm nineteen, who knows?

Tom: By the time you're nineteen...

Announcer: Hang on for the ride. Andy Field for ABC News, New York.

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