It Doesn’t Grow on Trees : Rancher Has Own Version of Cash Crop

The money crop on the Karydas ranch is--money.

To get out where Temecula booster Andreas (Andy) Karydas raises such an intriguing product, you have to travel about 15 miles east of Rancho California Plaza--the last five miles of it over the hard-packed dirt roads of the Tucalota Valley.

Out there--past the vineyards of the local wineries, through the winding lanes of the new suburban horse ranchitos and beyond the paddocks and stables of the professional horse spreads--the intrepid traveler finds himself at the ranch where money grows.

It’s easy to know you are there. On the highest hillock of the 22-acre spread, the American flag flies just above the blue-and-white flag of Greece and, at the entrance, a weather-beaten sign inside the white horse-farm-style fence proclaims: “Key Financial Services.”

This is where Andy Karydas, native of the island of Cyprus and former aerospace engineer, has since last July operated his full-service stock brokerage firm.

The 52-year-old broker in the boondocks will tell you proudly that inside the air-conditioned, modular house with the stained-glass front door, there is more than a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of computer hardware and software that keeps him plugged in to the major stock exchanges.

A 30-inch satellite dish on the roof--installed by the New York Stock Exchange at its own expense as part of a pilot program involving 200 brokers in the nation, Karydas explains--delivers the stock market “ticker” signal.

The signal bounced across the country from Wall Street to Karydas’ ranch via a space satellite sends the letters and numbers of the Big Board marching across the video screen of one of two computers he keeps “hot” every market day.

From 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., Karydas punches keys on his computer keyboards and keeps one eye on a desk-top television tuned to Channel 22, the financial station in Los Angeles.

Actually, according to Karydas, you couldn’t get more information about the major markets if you visited the offices of Morgan, Olmstead, Kennedy and Gardner--the downtown Los Angeles offices of the NYSE-member brokerage through which he clears much of his business--or even the floor of the Pacific Stock Exchange itself.

They all get the same ticker signal, the same information being piped into the computer on Karydas’ desk.

Among the things you couldn’t see on the stock displays at those big-city locations, however, are the analytical graphs Karydas can punch up on the computer screen at his boondocks brokerage firm, the products of his proprietary programs.

Between rides on the purebred Arabian horses that Karydas keeps for pleasure and entertaining, clients can sit with their broker and peruse the charts his custom-programmed software can generate to tell what’s doing with a certain stock on any given day.

He also has computer access to financial news from Barron’s, Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones News Service.

The heart of his system is his tracking of money flow--whether the “smart money” is moving into or out of a given security over a period of time.

His charts take the erratic ups and downs of daily or short-term performance of the stocks and smooth them into a flowing pattern that shows when a company’s stock is being accumulated by big-money investors, when the stock begins to appreciate and when the “insiders” sell off--followed, by a dramatic downturn as the stock price deteriorates.

“Oddly enough, he says, “in the case of a company going out of business, the diagram resembles a tombstone.”