STOCK JOCKS.

• Author: LANE, RANDALL
• Position: Teenage investors

Thanks to the Web, a new generation of teen investors is playing the stock market

the first stock 17-year-old Chris Stallman ever bought was Walgreens. It was an easy choice. His father is a pharmacist for the company. But that was two years ago, and ever since, Chris has been busy playing the market. He has turned his $2,400 college account into $8,000. He has helped launch a Web site, TeenAnalyst.com.

But perhaps the best benefit for the Bradley, Illinois, teen has been social. "Some girls in the high school have asked me to marry them," he says. "They think I'm going to be rich."

The marriage proposals may be unusual, but otherwise, what is most remarkable about Chris's story is how unremarkable it is. Over the last five years, the Internet has produced a new type of stock speculator: teenagers. The rise appears to continue unabated despite the slowing economy. It has become as enmeshed in the high school experience as football practice and yearbook meetings.

"It's not just the nerdy kids asking questions anymore," says Mitchell Slater, a vice president at Merrill Lynch brokerage company who lectures at schools. "The jocks, the cheerleaders, the druggies--they all want to talk about the market."

Some 12 percent of adolescents 12 to 17 now own stocks, versus 7 percent two years ago, according to a Merrill Lynch survey. That's more than 3 million youths nationwide. While the majority have accounts in the low thousands of dollars, a precocious and generally affluent few have portfolios in the six-figure range.

The phenomenon worries some experts. The wild swings in the market can be particularly troublesome for teens, raising concerns about gambling and dealing with self-esteem that rises and falls with the Dow. But many observers of teen investing say the vast majority follow a fairly conservative strategy, obeying the traditional rules of buying and holding and of investing in what you know.

Alexander Danielides, 14, is neither the fiercest nor the most lackadaisical investor at his high school, the Bronx High School of Science in New York City. When he was 9, he read the 1994 bestseller The Warren Buffett Way, and was fascinated. Applying some techniques immortalized by Buffett, the billionaire investing legend, he tripled his stake in Motorola, is now big on General Electric, and keeps a wary eye on Compaq Computer and AOL Time Warner.

A sophomore, Alexander says that he spends an hour a night researching stocks on the Internet, but he...