A pleasurable pastime like a crossword puzzle or a game of scrabble.

wallstreetspiders.net is an entertaining light-hearted hypothetical perspective of our American Financial Industry.

How did it start?

While recovering from the 2008 USA financial disaster, I found myself with some down time. Thereupon, I developed a curiosity for anagrams; they became infectious. This ambitious endeavor grew into an exploration into the concept of secret coding/decoding. Was there a system of conveying messages through the use of anagrams? My research led me to Ancient Greece where I discovered that anagrams had been a method of encrypted communication and some historians determined that the Greek poet Lycophron from the 4th century B.C. may have been the origin of the anagram. However, other historians date the anagram to the 6th century B.C. by Pythagoras and his disciples.

Throughout the ages, anagrams had various purposes. During the 17th century, scientists employed the use of anagrams to disguise their research until their discoveries were published. In the Victorian era, the cognate anagram was popularized. This anagram is transformed but is related to the original word/words. Famously, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE / WE ALL MAKE HIS PRAISE!

To begin my journey, I decided to start with one of the methods money exchanges. Ergo, I turned to the ever-changing New York Stock Exchange. Hence, wallstreetspiders.net was conceived.

The next question, I wanted to address was how could I determine the connections that would create a word, an abbreviation, an acronym, a compound word, a phrase or even a sentence that identified as an anagram to decipher. I delved into The Wall Street Journal’s top 1000 stock listing to begin playing with decoding. Fortunately, the TICKER symbols and the CHG numbers provided the necessary data to decode and at the same time learn about the companies that shepherd the world’s financial industry.

I began matching up the CHG numbers which provided TICKER symbols and I discovered that occasionally this methodology created anagrams. My curiosity developed into researching the history of the company’s as well as the history of anagrams and the speculative viewpoint derived from the anagram messages. As an artist, this viewpoint led me to visualizing the anagram I deciphered which than gave me the opportunity to create a contemporary visual commentary that evolved from that anagram into a BLOG. For example, I could write about the many industries that wield the power of the economic world and conceptualize it with a visual parody from that anagram.

How did I come up with the name wallstreetspiders.net? Of course, Wall Street is obvious but the word Spiders.Net was actually one of my early deciphered anagrams PRESIDENTS / TEN SPIDERS hence SPIDERS.NET which I still use today although the matching TICKER symbols have changed over the years. Also, I have several GO TO anagrams that I enjoy using to garner a message. For example, MY BIKE and BEN GLOW have been some of my favorites. You may develop your own GO TO’s to get started or just play the NUMBERS GAME or simply Decipher the Weekly Spinnerette Challenge.

A DADDY LONGLEGS: Not all company’s remain in the Top 1000. For example, the TICKER symbol S belonged to the phone company Sprint which is no more. Consequently, Spiders.net / Ten Spiders / Presidents has changed over time; it has been reborn through my own development of TICKER symbols. Visit CobWebs to view the NEW spiders.net TICKER symbols.