Basic Yearbook Quotes

I had taken the photograph from afar (distance being the basic glitch in our relationship), using my Nikon and zoom lens while hiding behind a fake marble pillar. I was hiding because if he knew I'd been secretly photographing him for all these months he would think I was immature, neurotic and obsessive. I'm not. I'm an artist. Artists are always misunderstood.(Thwonk)

As I travel around the financial services industry today, the most interesting trend I see is the one toward relationship consolidation. Now that Glass-Steagall has been repealed, and all financial services providers can provide just about all financial services, there's a tendency - particularly as people get older - to want to tie everything up... to develop a plan, which implies having a planner. A planner, not a whole bunch of 'em... You've got basically two options. One is that you can sit here and wait for a major investment firm, which handles your client's investment portfolio while you handle the insurance, to bring their developing financial and estate planning capabilities to your client's door. And to take over the whole relationship. In this case, you have chosen to be the Consolidatee. A better option is for you to be the Consolidator. That is, you go out and consolidate the clients' financial lives pursuant to a really great plan - the kind you pride yourselves on. And of course that would involve your taking over management of the investment portfolio. Let's start with the classic Ibbotson data [Stocks, Bonds, Bills and Inflation Yearbook, Ibbotson Associates]. In the only terms that matter to the long-term investor - the real rate of return - he [the stockholder] got paid more like three times what the bondholder did. Why would an efficient market, over more than three quarters of a centry, pay the holders of one asset class anything like three times what it paid the holders of the other major asset class? Most people would say: risk. Is it really risk that's driving the premium returns, or is it volatility? It's volatility.... I invite you to look carefully at these dirty dozen disasters: the twelve bear markets of roughly 20% or more in the S&P 500 since the end of WWII. For the record, the average decline took about thirteen months from peak to trough, and carried the index down just about 30%. And since there've been twelve of these "disasters" in the roughly sixty years since war's end, we can fairly say that, on average, the stock market in this country has gone down about 30% about one year in five.... So while the market was going up nearly forty times - not counting dividends, remember - what do we feel was the major risk to the long-term investor? Panic. 'The secret to making money in stocks is not getting scared out of them' Peter Lynch.

I dyed my Jew-fro bright green, which kind of faded and turned a pukey yellow color, so I basically made my big entrance into Point Grey looking like a giant fucking clown.