Stock Market Guess Is Right On the Money

Robert Tokarchek was at a Home Depot looking for a washing machine hose when he joined the ranks of Silicon Valley whiz kids and instant stock market moguls.

Last week just a retired Point Mugu engineer, the ruddy, silver-haired 61-year-old is now an Internet millionaire.

Tokarchek won the $1 million in a contest sponsored by online brokerage E-Trade, after correctly guessing the Dow Jones Industrial Average would finish the 1990s at 11,497.12--on the nose.

When the call came--one the Tokarchek family of Westlake had been expecting with nervous anticipation--his wife, Ellen, picked up the phone and told the caller her husband wasn’t home.

“I asked, ‘Is this what I think it is?’ ” she said Thursday. “And then there was silence for what seemed like forever. And I said, ‘This is his wife. You can tell me.’ ”

They did--and sent Ellen out to fetch her husband. Ellen and the Tokarcheks’ grown daughters, Susan and Stacey, jumped into the car, went to Home Depot and found Robert parked in front of a washing machine.

“They caught me standing in the aisle,” he said. “I see my wife and daughter coming down the aisle, yelling, ‘We got the call! We got the call!’ ”

Now, the first question everyone asks him is: How did you know? Where did that perfect number--down to the decimal--come from?

“Heaven,” he answers.

And the hunch of a novice investor.

“When you have money in the stock market, you get really interested in where you think it’s going,” said Tokarchek, who has been trading online for eight months. “I made an assumption that it was going to stay smooth.”

Tokarchek e-mailed his entry on Nov. 22, eight days before the close of the contest. He first guessed 11,500, then worried that number was a little clean and “backed up a few bucks.”

He tried 60 cents in the decimal column, but said he didn’t feel comfortable with its roundness. The .12 was the crowning stroke.

Tokarchek said he is up about 15% since he started investing in the stock market, after years of relying on mutual funds.

Tokarchek had the only exact entry among the hundreds of thousands received, according to a Menlo Park-based E-Trade spokeswoman.

“That’s what’s so great. He nailed it to the decimal point,” said Heather Fondo of E-Trade. “We’re working to get him that check right now.”

The two days since he got the call have been a whirlwind, hobnobbing with E-Trade officials and sitting for pictures and videos for the company. Tokarchek will nab $50,000 a year for 20 years, before taxes, but he hasn’t had a chance to learn when the payments will begin.

Will the new-found riches spoil Tokarchek?

Thirty years of work as a Point Mugu engineer don’t leave one with expensive tastes, he said.

He doesn’t dream of power boats or ski lodges. Ellen isn’t imagining herself in new fur coats, dripping with diamonds. The first buy will be a Palm Springs condominium--upgraded from their previously planned purchase of a mobile home.

And the big, post phone-call celebration was lunch at a local delicatessen, where there wasn’t a bottle of Dom Perignon to be found.

Times staff writer Jeffrey Gettleman contributed to this report.