What if? Trading without the internet...?

Well, you could do what we all did prior to the internet. We used graph paper and plotted the stocks daily from the WSJ. What a pain that was. A diligent person could track about 25 different stocks. And yes there were weekly subscriptions to stock charts also, especially point and figure. Heck I thought all of those services went out of business.

If you would like to know the stock price, the most feasible way would be to look in a newspaper. Getting your hands on up-to-date charts would be unlikely as there are way to may stocks out there (upwards of 7000), all the charts could not be printed and mailed in a concise fashio (except perhaps as a CD-ROM).

To make trades one could call, mail or fax their broker.

If there was a true technological emergency, one must relaize that the exchanges and national amrket syste are all largely electronic. As technology is integrated, if there is a problem with one system, they might shut down others. In such a case, the exchange would stop trading and the SEC would declare an emergency until the issues were resolved.

I just checked the website and ValueLine still puts out its product on paper. I started in stocks by going through the printed pages at Smith Barney Harris Upham on my lunch hour, just a block from where I worked at that time. They can still mail it to you. They never were free (unless you went to the broker to read them, or a good library), though. Businessweek, WSJ, and maybe Forbes or Fortune, but those are more for fundamentalists, not technicalists/chartists.

Don't worry, you can still make money without the internet, a good example is BILLIONAIRE Warren Buffet. He did not have any of our tools today and he made billions of dollars!