Tim Slater, a guest in our next Computer Chronicles episode from June 1988, gave an interview in 2022 to The Sunny Harris Show! with Samuel K. Tennis podcast about his career promoting the concept of technical analysis as an investment strategy. In brief, technical analysis is where you base investment decisions on the performance of a stock over time–i.e., its price fluctuations and volume of shares traded–without assessing the underlying merits of the company. As Slater explained to Sunny Harris, his mentor in technical analysis didn’t even know the names of the companies he analyzed. His staff simply brought him the charts of the company’s stock performance without any identifying information.

The major theme for this season of Computer Chronicles has been, “Why would anyone actually buy a personal computer?” This next episode from February 1986 looks at one reason–managing your investments. After all, if you have enough money to invest in the stock market, you probably had the disposable income to purchase expensive hardware and software to keep an eye on those investments.

Would You Trust a Computer with Your Money?

Stewart Cheifet and Gary Kildall opened the program with a short demonstration of Wizard of Wall Street, a stock market simulator from Synapse Software. Cheifet noted that while this was a game, more and more real investors were using their personal computers to manage their portfolios and conduct transactions from their homes. Would Kildall trust a computer to tell him how to invest his money? Kildall quipped he’d like to see the results of the advice first. He added that if we all followed the advice of a single computer program, it wouldn’t lead to a very interesting market. On a more serious note, he said there was a lot of value in online services, such as instant stock trading and historical stock information. He would even use a simulator like Wizard to learn more about the market and its terminology.