How software is eating the banking industry

Ethan Bloch was in junior high school in Baltimore during the dot-com boom. For his bar mitzvah -- the ceremony that welcomes 13-year-old Jewish boys into adulthood -- Bloch received $7,000 in cash. It was 1998 and, like so many amateur traders at the time, he plunged his wealth into the stock market, mostly software and telecommunication names like Lucent and Nortel. He quickly tripled his money. By age 15, it was all gone.