Goldman Sachs Conference: Chambermaid Watch

There is an old story that Joseph Kennedy sold his stocks just before the 1929 stock market crash after he heard a shoeshine man discussing stock tips.

Fast forward to 1999. At the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium here at the Grand Hyatt in New York, it is not just investors and money managers who are paying close attention. A number of chambermaids in the hotel are also keeping an eye on the proceedings.

As they are changing and cleaning rooms, chambermaids at the Grand Hyatt are watching the Bloomberg business channel for the latest market updates, conference news and tidbits. They also check on what kind of laptop computers conference attendees have in their rooms.

Why? If it's good enough for the pros, it must be fast enough for home trading, one chambermaid reasoned. "My sister bought one, but we think it is too slow," she said, explaining that her family members like to use the computer to research and trade stocks from home. "I told her not to get a big one because I see all these people have these small ones."

She said she became interested in business news "because my brother and brother-in-law have been investing in stocks for the past year or two."

So what are her favorite stock picks?

"The market has gone down so much that we haven't invested lately," she said. "We lost a lot of money because we trade on margin. I told them that I want to invest, but not on margin, because I don't have the money to pay to cover my positions" when the market drops.

A cautionary tale if there ever was one.

Novell Opens Up

Directory software company Novell (NOVL Quote) is much happier to talk this week.

Last week, at the NationsBanc Montgomery Securities conference in San Francisco, an investor blasted the Utah-based company for not touting itself and its upcoming products. Novell officials must have paid attention.

Eric Schmidt, the company's CEO, said Novell expects its caching product, which will rival a similar product by Inktomi (INKT Quote), to hit the markets in the first part of the year. "There's no product that is even relatively close to ours based on price performance," he said.

As for competition down the road from old nemesis Microsoft (MSFT Quote), Schmidt said it was hard to tell since the Redmond, Wash. software company has yet to release its active directory to compete with Novell's directory products. Microsoft's active directory will be rolled out in Windows 2000, which has been continuously delayed.

Schmidt also said he was "not convinced that [Microsoft's] scalability is competitive with ours now. By the time their product gets to market, we'll also be at least on the fourth generation of ours."

One fund manager who owns Novell shares and has made money off its recent stock rise is still skeptical. "I came here to get a sense of how widely spread Novell's directory is," he said, noting that even if Microsoft is late to market, the company is so big that it might be able to catch up quickly.