PROFILE
Kris Skrinak's circuitous route to financial proselytizer has seen him through some dramatic life changes - East Village punk to midtown paralegal to Wall Street high priest. Skrinak, head of ClearStation, a Web site that helps individual investors understand stock trends, originally drifted to New York in 1979 as the lead singer of a punk rock band. When it became clear that playing at CBGB's for 17 bucks per gig wasn't going to pay the bills, he followed the well-worn path toward respectability: temping. It being New York, he soon found himself with a regular job at staid Goldman Sachs, leveraging programming skills he learned at NYU.
"Nobody wanted to do quantitative computer stuff back then," says Skrinak, now 38. "It was seen as being too far out." So he ended up with renowned economist Fischer Black's group, working on the first electronic trading system.
"It was incredibly exciting to participate in that financial revolution," he says. "At one point, up to 20 percent of the volume on the New York Stock Exchange was derived from our system."
Now, with San Francisco-based ClearStation, Skrinak feels he's participating in a second revolution - this time bringing the kinds of tools he helped develop at Goldman Sachs to individual investors. The free ClearStation site includes tutorials on such esoterica as stochastic technical analysis and moving average convergence/divergence, as well as graphs that illustrate what these tools say about a given stock.
"There are three ways to pick stocks: technical analysis (what the chart says), fundamentals (what the company says), and community (what your friends or brokers say)," Skrinak says. "What we do differently from other sites is provide interpretation: We'll show you what the chart says and make it clear who on our bulletin boards has the best track record and who is worth listening to."
So which technique is best? It doesn't matter, says Skrinak: "We're not religious about anything we do - except making money."
ClearStation: on the Web at www.clearstation.com/.
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