*New* When New Beginnings Meet Old Realities

Editor's Note: With this column, we introduce Laurel Kenner and Victor Niederhoffer. Kenner joins TheStreet.com from Bloomberg, where she headed U.S. stock market coverage and appeared regularly on the Bloomberg TV channel. She began her journalism career with the Associated Press in Los Angeles, and later won awards for aerospace reporting at Copley Newspapers.

Victor Niederhoffer is a private investor in Weston, Conn. Previously a hedge fund manager, Niederhoffer was rated among the top performers for many years -- and the worst performer in 1997 when he was stung by bad speculations in Thailand and U.S. stocks. His 1997 book, The Education of a Speculator, rose to second place on the Business Week bestseller list, and was described by Barron's as "a must-read, essential for any investor's library."

"Bibles and swords!" was Captain Inish Scull's wily strategy for colonizing native Americans in Larry McMurtry's novel Comanche Moon. The stock market seems to be following the Captain's exhortation as it struggles between the beatific vision of a technological utopia in which earnings grow to the moon -- and the evil forces of high interest rates and Nasdaq hype. So far, the evil forces are in ascendance; millennial celebrations gave way to days of judgment as markets from Hong Kong to Germany to the U.S. Nasdaq suffered 10% declines.

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