A more informed consumer coupled with near-perfect economic conditions in the United States has led more individual investors to put their money into the stock market - and the Nasdaq is no exception.

The Nasdaq market has soared 17 per cent since the beginning of the year and heavily laden with technology companies, Wall Street expects tech stocks to perform well in the quarterly earnings reports. Internet stocks, such as Yahoo! and Amazon.com along with large cap names such as Intel, Dell and Microsoft, continue to be the strongest performers.

"Right now, most people are putting money into large cap companies like Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Dell, MCI/Worldcom and America Online," said a New York-based individual investor who has been investing in the stock market for the past five years.

"Although the stock market is going higher and breaking new records each week, the average stock price is trading lower than before the crash last year," he said. Participation in companies is not broadening but getting narrower.

Money is being ploughed into the best-performing companies with a lot riding on speculation about how Internet stocks will perform in the future. Right now, the average stock of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index is worth 26 times earnings.

"The Internet phase has created a financial bubble," this investor said. "Some Internet companies run up in price and will justify it. An awful lot of others will not even be around in five years' time," he predicted.

But no-one can deny that the US is living through a boom period. Interest rates, inflation and unemployment are at all-time lows. And the fruits of this can be seen in the all-time high investor confidence in the stock market.

Over the past few years, Nasdaq has seen a slight decrease in institutional investment, and a corresponding increase in individual investors, in its market.

Mr Mike Shokouhi, a spokesman for Nasdaq in Washington DC said Nasdaq records investors by the size of their trades - in blocks versus non-blocks. A block is 10,000 shares or more and is generally assumed to be traded by an institution. In February, he said, 26.4 per cent of Nasdaq volume were block trades, compared to 30.8 per cent in 1998 and 35.5 per cent in 1995. "The size of trades is definitely dropping," he said.

Nasdaq has carried out two shareholder surveys - the first in 1990 and the second in 1997. In the two years since the last survey, the Internet has mushroomed giving ordinary investors access to a vast amount of data and the ability to trade and track their investments on-line. However, some demographics from the survey remain significant.

Conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, the 1997 survey questioned 1,214 investors who own either stock mutual funds or stock in individual companies, and 252 potential investors.

It found that investors were no longer primarily white males but "look more like America". A majority were under 50-years-old, 47 per cent were women and half were not college graduates. And 10 per cent were homemakers.

The survey also found the printed word remained the single most common source of financial information - particularly the Wall Street Journal, local newspapers and magazines such as Money and Forbes. A majority of Nasdaq investors had a computer at home.

One recent entrant into Nasdaq trading is aged 32 and based in New Jersey. He said he uses the Internet portal Yahoo! to keep track of his stocks. "Until now, I would never have known how to do this but the Internet has taken a lot of the mystery out of buying stocks," he said.

One New York-based Irishman who invests in the US stock market considers himself a trader when he has spare cash rather than an active trader. He does have some Nasdaq shares. "Maybe it's my patriotism," he said. "Most of my investments are in Irish companies trading on Nasdaq which just got hammered last week - Iona and Icon. It was not a pretty picture - but I'm in for the long term, so hopefully they will rebound," he commented.

Overall, it is hard to predict which companies will do well but Wall Street is merciless to those that don't perform. If a company does not issue earnings per share that meet or exceed Wall Street expectations, its stock will suffer and investors will put their money elsewhere.

"Even though earnings might improve the next quarter, confidence has gone out of the market and an individual investor will be reluctant to get back into that stock," one investor said.