Prospectus Quotes

Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.

Love never comes with a brochure of rules and regulations, a prospectus with guides of what is acceptable and what is abominable. It’s a standard to follow your heart, and that’s what I did and if doing that hurt you, then I’m sorry… sorry for coming in your life and wasting your time, for causing you an anguish so great that you could not bear the sight of me. Today, I am proud to stand up and honour myself and proclaim to the world… yes, I loved someone more than myself. I loved someone truly, madly, deeply!

Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all. How dare you intervene? As well ask, How dare you not?

Only someone who has Asperger’s would read a subprime mortgage bond prospectus,

It’s difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words “Thou shalt not.” But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them? Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us. Denounce all jihad-ists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above.

The explosion of paperwork, in turn, is a direct result of the introduction of corporate management techniques, which are always justified as ways of increasing efficiency, by introducing competition at every level. What these management techniques invariably end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell each other things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of our students’ job and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors, institutes, conference workshops, and universities themselves, which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors. Marketing and PR thus come to engulf every aspect of university life.

You alone in Europe are not ancient oh Christianity The most modern European is you Pope Pius X And you whom the windows observe shame keeps you From entering a church and confessing this morning You read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloud That's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapers There are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteries Portraits of great men and a thousand different headlines ("Zone")

Someone recently showed me the annual prospectus of a large spiritual organization. When I looked through it, I was impressed by the wide choice of interesting seminars and workshops. It reminded me of a smorgasbord, one of those Scandinavian buffets where you can take your pick from a huge variety of enticing dishes. The person asked me whether I could recommend one or two courses. “I don’t know,” I said. “They all look so interesting. But I do know this,” I added. “Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and it will be more powerfully transformative than attending all of these courses. And it’s free.

Oh, fine,' Ken said. He took the piece of yellow paper and flipped it over and wrote: 'Dear Mr. Reed, I'm sorry the client wasn't entirely satisfied with your draft prospectus. However, even sticklers for grammar are divided over the question as to whether it is necessarily incorrect to begin a sentence with the word 'and.' I hope that allays your concerns.

Design came into being in 1919, when Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus at Weimar. Part of the prospectus of this school reads: 'The function of art has in the past been given a formal importance which has severed it from our daily life; but art is always present when a people lives sincerely and health. 'Thus our job is to invest a new system of education that may lead to a complete knowledge of human needs and a universal awareness of them.' [...] What Gropius wrote is still valid. Tis first school of design did tend to make a new kind of artist, an artist useful to society because he helps society to recover its balance, and not to lurch between a false world to live one's material life in and and ideal world to take moral revenge in.

According to an equally lovingly preserved English translation of the prospectus, the purpose of Ibuka’s firm was “to establish an ideal factory that stresses a spirit of freedom and open-mindedness, and where engineers with sincere motivation can exercise their technological skills to the highest level.” We shall, he pledged, “eliminate any unfair profit-seeking exercises” and “seek expansion not only for the sake of size.” Further, “we shall carefully select employees . . . we shall avoid to have [sic] formal positions for the mere sake of having them, and shall place emphasis on a person’s ability, performance and character, so that each

If Jones magically converted 50 outs a year into walks, presto: now he’s Ken Griffey, Jr.

Matt Levine, a Bloomberg columnist who writes a detailed and witty daily email dissected by Wall Street bankers, had been on vacation when the prospectus went live. The following Monday morning, he wrote in his email that the “We” trademark news was “the news item that caused me to absolutely lose my mind—the item that, if I were a slightly more dedicated financial columnist, would have had me on the next helicopter back to the office.

One must have the nerve to assert that, while people are entitle to their illusions, they are not entitled to a limitless enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them upon others. Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all. How dare you intervene? As well ask, How dare you not? Are you so sure you know better? Ask yourself this question a thousand times, but if you are sure, have the confidence and dignity to say so. It certainly helps prevent the art and science of disputation from dying out amongst us.

Mr. Airlie had lunched the day before with a leonine old gentleman who every Sunday morning thundered forth Social Democracy to enthusiastic multitudes on Tower Hill. Joan had once listened to him and had almost been converted: he was so tremendously in earnest. She now learnt that he lived in Curzon Street, Mayfair, and filled, in private life, the perfectly legitimate calling of a company promoter in partnership with a Dutch Jew. His latest prospectus dwelt upon the profits to be derived from an amalgamation of the leading tanning industries: by means of which the price of leather could be enormously increased.

I have been inordinately lucky all my life but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth. She has turned me into a moral man but not a prig, she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody's fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and willful, she is clement and loving. Dulcis Imperatrix, she is Sunday's child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when i am away from her, and she loves me. She is a prospectus that can never be entirely cataloged, an almanac for Poor Richard. And I'll love her til I die.

Expectation always introduces an element of bias, because it anticipates outcomes without waiting to see what actually happens. However, if expectations are consistently modified in the face of experience in a (*)-like or Bayesian manner, then over time, the influence of initial expectations will tend to diminish as new experiences “tune” expectations to actual frequencies through the reduction of prediction error. As experience grows in magnitude and diversity, Bayesians point out, initial expectations tend to “wash out,” and individuals who began from different starting assumptions, but encountered similar experience, will tend to converge in their expectations. And importantly, they will tend to converge on the actual “natural statistics” of their environment

He asked me innocently, what then had brought me to his home, and without a minutes hesitation I told him an astounding lie. A lie which was later to prove a great truth. I told him I was only pretending to sell the encyclopedia in order to meet people and write about them. That interested him enormously, even more than the encyclopedia. He wanted to know what I would write about him, if I could say. It's taken me twenty years to answer that question, but here it is. If you would still like to know, John Doe of the city of Bayonne, this is it. I owe you a great deal, because after that lie I told you, I left your house and I tore up the prospectus furnished me by The Encyclopedia Britannica and I threw it in the gutter. I said to myself I will never again go to people under false pretenses, even if is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people and if anybody knocks at my door to sell me something, I will invite him in and say "Why are you doing this?" and if he says it is because he needs to make a living I will offer him what money I have and beg him once again to think what he is doing. I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death, it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death jams another cog in the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbor in order to get the food he needs than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to earn a living. That's what I want to say, Mr John Doe.

Once we’ve taken all of this into account, we see that the results against objectives or “black box” results are a lagging indicator. And as they say in the mutual fund prospectuses, “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” The white-box CEO evaluation criteria—“Does the CEO know what to do?” and “Can the CEO get the company to do it?”—will do a much better job of predicting the future.

Activity pouch on airplanes Buttons and pins Crayons and coloring place mats from restaurants Disposable sample cup from the grocery store Erasers and pencils with eraser tops Fireman hat from a visit to the fire station Goodie bags from county fairs and festivals Hair comb from picture day at school Infant goods from the maternity ward Junior ranger badge from the ranger station and Smokey the Bear Kids’ meal toys Lollipops and candy from various locations, such as the bank Medals and trophies for simply participating in (versus winning) a sporting activity Noisemakers to celebrate New Year’s Eve OTC samples from the doctor’s office Party favors and balloons from birthday parties Queen’s Jubilee freebies (for overseas travelers) Reusable plastic “souvenir” cup and straw from a diner Stickers from the doctor’s office Toothbrushes and floss from the dentist’s office United States flags on national holidays Viewing glasses for a 3-D movie (why not keep one pair and reuse them instead?) Water bottles at sporting events XYZ, etc.: The big foam hand at a football or baseball game or Band-Aids after a vaccination or various newspapers, prospectuses, and booklets from school, museums, national parks . . .

It was one of the supposed advantages of Groom Place that we did not wear a uniform. Our personalities were thus given full scope to express themselves through the medium of our clothes. At least that was what it said in the prospectus, and more or less what my mother had said when she sent me to the school. But, as far as I was concerned, it didn’t work out like that. My clothes expressed nothing but Miss Partridge’s distaste for shopping and our mutual antagonism to each other. I longed for the stuffy anonymous blue serge and black stockings of my High School. There, there had been no nonsense about personality. But there was nothing I could do about it except pretend that I wasn’t wearing an apple-green stockinette dress. I didn’t like green and I didn’t like stockinette. It was hard to have to endure them both in one garment.

I like these ideas a lot. I think this is the type of business you should be developing more broadly.” He was right. My skills were as an investor, and they could be applied anywhere, particularly in countries that faced issues similar to Russia’s. I didn’t need to be in Russia to succeed. As I shared these investment ideas with other clients, most had the same reaction as Jean. By the fall of 2006, my confidence had grown so much that I started drafting a prospectus for a new fund called Hermitage Global.

The perceptive in the City could see that their long run of ever more perfect freedom, beginning with Margaret Thatcher’s big bang and advancing, to their pleasant surprise, under Tony Blair’s New Labour, was facing a prolonged interruption when the masses worked out that they had been left with the bill for the incipient crisis. The new moneymen of the former Soviet Union shared with the libertarians of the City a loathing for the state. They had done splendid business together, the industrial triumphs of the proletariat laid out in lavish stock market prospectuses.

It is clearly evident that unethical and corrupt practices were the bedrock of Prannoy Roy journalism. After getting the Doordarshan contract through patronage and a quid pro quo, he shrewdly cashed out over Rs.23 crores (to his personal account in 1994-95) in a short span of few years (see Table 1 below) by selling shares at astronomical valuations to a foreign investor. Simply put, through political patronage he built a business and cashed out for personal profit.  Table 1. Source: NDTV public issue prospectus filed with SEBI in 2004. Date of transfer No. of Equity Shares (Face value of Rs.10) Cost per Shares (Rs.) Price (Rs.) Nature of payment No. of Equity Shares (of Face Value of Rs.4) post splitting 21 Oct 1994 48,140 10 675 Cash 120,350 16 May 1995 99,070 10 675 Cash 247,675 Jul 21 1995 121,625 10 675 Cash 304,063 Aug 22 1995 81,481 10 675 Cash 203,702 After inking favorable deals with Doordarshan, many people in Central Government in 1997 helped NDTV to clinch a magical figure deal with Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV[3] during the liberalization period. The Lutyens Delhi’s cozy club arm twisted Murdoch into an agreement with Prannoy Roy’s NDTV to launch the Star News channel.

It was easy enough to launch a new project in this over-heated investment environment. All one had to do was to find a person of known substance to act as a named sponsor, advertise the project in a paper, naming a coffee house where subscriptions would be taken, and turn up at the appointed place and time to issue receipts against investors' down payments. No business plan, authorisation procedure or prospectus was necessary and funds were entrusted to unknown persons who might (and sometimes did) abscond with the day's takings.

The society needed five hundred thousand dollars in seed capital, and the prospectus pointed out that it could be paid for partly in government bonds, promoting public debt and the industrial city at one stroke. “Here is the resource which has been hitherto wanted,” Hamilton boasted.36 That Hamilton was prepared to ransack European industrial secrets was made plain when the prospectus said that “means ought to be taken to procure from Europe skilful workmen and such machines and implements as cannot be had here in sufficient perfection.

new age of “dynamism” and a compensating new science of “dynamics” to “treat the primary unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of love, and fear, and wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character.” The human, he says, “is not the creature and product of mechanism, but in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.” “Signs of the Times” is one of the best pieces Carlyle ever wrote. Critique is balanced by prospectus, denunciation by advocacy. “This deep paralysed subjection to physical objects comes not from nature, but from our own unwise mode of viewing nature.” Nowhere in English is there a more forceful statement of the importance of the German concept of Bildung. “To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects in himself.”10

This may have something to do with a tendency to discount the cost or quality advantages of quasi-monopolist combination that is at present as pronounced as was the exaggeration of them in the typical prospectus or announcement of sponsors of such combinations.]

An integral part of a public offering is a “road show,” during which company leaders pitch their prospects to bankers and investment gurus. Brin and Page refused to see themselves as supplicants. According to Lise Buyer, the founders routinely spurned any advice from the experienced financial team they’d hired to guide them through the process. “If you told them you couldn’t do something a certain way, they would think you were an idiot,” she says. The tone of the road-show presentations was set early, as Brin and Page introduced themselves by first names, an opening more appropriate for bistro waiters than potential captains of industry. And of course they weren’t attired like executives—the day of their presentation of Google’s case to investors was one more in a lifetime of casual dress days for them. Google had prepared a video to promote the company, but viewers considered it amateurish. It was poorly lit and wasn’t even enlivened by the customary upbeat musical sound track. Though anyone who read the prospectus should have been prepared for that, some investors had difficulty with the heresy that Google was willing to forgo some profits for its founders’ idealistic views of what made the world a better place. On the video Brin cautioned that Google might apply its resources “to ameliorate a number of the world’s problems.” Probably the low point of the road show was a massive session involving 1,500 potential investors at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. Brin and Page caused a firestorm by refusing to answer many questions, cracking jokes instead. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Some investors sitting in the ballroom began speculating with each other whether the executives had spent any time practicing the presentation, or if they were winging it.” The latter was in fact the case—despite the desperate urging of Google’s IPO team, Page and Brin had refused to perform even a cursory run-through.

So what will it be? A radical sabbatical, a branching project, or a conversational exploration? The moment has come to lay this book aside and take action. My advice at this point is as follows: • Brainstorm three possible selves, then think of three ways you could ‘act now, and reflect later’ to test each of these selves. Give yourself half an hour right now and get started. Phone an organization that interests you and ask if they take on volunteers. Register a domain name for a business idea you have. Order a prospectus for a training course you could take. Email a wide-achiever friend and ask if you could meet to discuss how they manage it.

The cost estimate of the prospectus turned out to be a best possible outcome based on the unlikely assumption that everything would go according to plan with no delays, no changes in performance specifications, no management problems, no problems with contractual arrangements or new technologies or geology, no major conflicts, no political promises not kept, and so on.

For Rosseau, then, education would have to be a way not of instilling the ideals of civilization but rather of liberating the young from civilization and its evils. Much of the program he described in his didactic novel Emile is what he calls "negative education," an antidote and inoculation against the pervasive evils of civilization. It has come to be called "The Child's Charter"-a basis for modern child psychology. And it would be the prospectus and statement of principles for "progressive education" in the United States, led by John Dewey (1859-1952), who conceived it as a way of bringing democracy into the classroom (The School and Society, 1899; Democracy and Education, 1916). The movement attended tot he child's physical and emotional as well as his intellectual development, favored "learning by doing," and encouraged experimental and independent thinking. The teacher, then, aimed not at instilling a body of knowledge but at developing the pupil's own skill at learning from experience.

Sony’s “Founding Prospectus,” handwritten by Ibuka in 1946, described “a stable workplace where engineers could work to their hearts’ content in full consciousness of their joy in technology.

the earth is not a fresh-air resort and the idyllic prospectuses of the earth tell lies.

Betemit's positional flexibility is the same as yours: He can stand around and muse about the great philosophical debates of our day anywhere on the field. Catching and throwing the baseball is an entirely different question.

The risk category and colour codes are to be marked in the prospectus, Statement of Additional Information (SAI), application form and any other communication related to the respective MF scheme.

Hope is an investment that never fails the investor; don’t read the Red Herring prospectus before investing in hope.

It’s time to admit that Chapman, who’s still only 27, is simply playing a different game than everyone else.

the southpaw also struck out 53 percent of the batters he faced. That’s the highest single-season percentage in history,

At this point, the argument that the Orioles are a fluke doesn’t hold water.

The key to winning baseball games is pitching, fundamentals, and three-run homers.

Inside view of the men's bath—Lahmann Sanatorium (Prospectus of Dr. Lahmann's Sanatorium, Weisser Hirsch 1921/22 Archive of the Eden Foundation, Bad Soden) In Veldes, Lahmann was deeply impressed by Rikli's light-and-air bath, later an essential part of his treatment program. He discussed its benefits in his book,The Air Bath as a Curative and Hardening Agent (1898), and quoted a letter by Benjamin Franklin, written to the French translator of his works in 1750

Wall Street’s cynical investment bankers systematically underpriced initial public offerings of stock, or IPOs, enabling the shares to soar by as much as 697% on their first day of trading. That, in turn, made investors desperate to get in on the ground floor of the next IPO. It’s no coincidence that the official disclosure document of an IPO is called a “prospectus,” from the Latin term for “looking forward.

They ran academies for boys preparing for college, and for boys “preparing for mercantile professions who may want education superior to common schools,” as one school’s prospectus read. They offered special classes, mainly for boys, in drawing, music, languages, writing, and dancing. Women, by contrast, taught small classes of girls, or sometimes groups of young children of both sexes, in their homes or rented rooms. In 1822, there were more than fifty such “schoolmistresses” listing their services in the Boston directory, and probably just as many women teaching school without bothering to register their addresses. Girls in these “primary schools” learned little more than the basics of reading, writing, geography, arithmetic, and needlepoint.

And neither yet understanding that a path is not a prospectus and that it may, in the instant it takes for a word to be spoken or a finger-hold to be lost, slip right off your map and lead you somewhere unimagined in all your certainties.

The Phillies’ Opening Day third baseman rolled into training camp a little fitter than last year, accrediting his weight loss to the fact that he’d cut out whiskey. This was ironic, as much of the Phillies’ 2020 output had fans reaching for a drink.

majors,

The functioning of the acorn brain is the subject of a new field of research known as prospective psychology, which argues that what makes humans unique is our ability to think about, or “prospect,” the future. To borrow a term from psychologist Martin Seligman, we are Homo prospectus, a species “guided by imagining alternatives stretching into the future.”8

Steve Schwarzman, a thirty-one-year-old investment banker at Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb at the time, burned with curiosity to know how the deal worked. The buyers, he saw, were putting up little capital of their own and didn’t have to pledge any of their own collateral. The only security for the loans came from the company itself. How could they do this? He had to get his hands on the bond prospectus, which would provide a detailed blueprint of the deal’s mechanics. Schwarzman, a mergers and acquisitions specialist with a self-assured swagger and a gift for bringing in new deals, had been made a partner at Lehman Brothers that very month. He sensed that something new was afoot—a way to make fantastic profits and a new outlet for his talents, a new calling.

MORAL AND QUESTIONS: The speculative public is incorrigible. In financial terms it cannot count beyond 3. It will buy anything, at any price, if there seems to be some “action” in progress. It will fall for any company identified with “franchising,” computers, electronics, science, technology, or what have you, when the particular fashion is raging. Our readers, sensible investors all, are of course above such foolishness. But questions remain: Should not responsible investment houses be honor-bound to refrain from identifying themselves with such enterprises, nine out of ten of which may be foredoomed to ultimate failure? (This was actually the situation when the author entered Wall Street in 1914. By comparison it would seem that the ethical standards of the “Street” have fallen rather than advanced in the ensuing 57 years, despite all the reforms and all the controls.) Could and should the SEC be given other powers to protect the public, beyond the present ones which are limited to requiring the printing of all important relevant facts in the offering prospectus? Should some kind of box score for public offerings of various types be compiled and published in conspicuous fashion? Should every prospectus, and perhaps every confirmation of sale under an original offering, carry some kind of formal warranty that the offering price for the issue is not substantially out of line with the ruling prices for issues of the same general type already established in the market? As we write this edition a movement toward reform of Wall Street abuses is under way. It will be difficult to impose worthwhile changes in the field of new offerings, because the abuses are so largely the result of the public’s own heedlessness and greed. But the matter deserves long and careful consideration.

Buying a bond only for its yield is like getting married only for the sex. If the thing that attracted you in the first place dries up, you’ll find yourself asking, “What else is there?” When the answer is “Nothing,” spouses and bondholders alike end up with broken hearts. On May 9, 2001, WorldCom, Inc. sold the biggest offering of bonds in U.S. corporate history—$11.9 billion worth. Among the eager beavers attracted by the yields of up to 8.3% were the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, one of the world’s largest pension funds; Retirement Systems of Alabama, whose managers later explained that “the higher yields” were “very attractive to us at the time they were purchased”; and the Strong Corporate Bond Fund, whose comanager was so fond of WorldCom’s fat yield that he boasted, “we’re getting paid more than enough extra income for the risk.” 1 But even a 30-second glance at WorldCom’s bond prospectus would have shown that these bonds had nothing to offer but their yield—and everything to lose. In two of the previous five years WorldCom’s pretax income (the company’s profits before it paid its dues to the IRS) fell short of covering its fixed charges (the costs of paying interest to its bondholders) by a stupendous $4.1 billion. WorldCom could cover those bond payments only by borrowing more money from banks. And now, with this mountainous new helping of bonds, WorldCom was fattening its interest costs by another $900 million per year!2 Like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, WorldCom was gorging itself to the bursting point. No yield could ever be high enough to compensate an investor for risking that kind of explosion. The WorldCom bonds did produce fat yields of up to 8% for a few months. Then, as Graham would have predicted, the yield suddenly offered no shelter: WorldCom filed bankruptcy in July 2002. WorldCom admitted in August 2002 that it had overstated its earnings by more than $7 billion.3 WorldCom’s bonds defaulted when the company could no longer cover their interest charges; the bonds lost more than 80% of their original value.

only way to be sure how the redemption fee is assessed in a fund that you’re considering investing in is to read the prospectus carefully.

decadence: the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written.’16 If Pater was the godfather of the Nineties, then undoubtedly its most precocious child and greatest visual genius was Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), and The Yellow Book, the artistic quarterly which he helped to found with his friend Henry Harland, its Scripture. When he took a bundle of drawings to Burne-Jones’s studio in Fulham, the older artist told Beardsley, then aged eighteen, ‘Nature has given you every gift which is necessary to become a great artist. I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art as a profession, but in your case I can do nothing else.’17 Whistler, whose relations with Beardsley were much edgier, made a generous admission in 1896 when he saw Beardsley’s brilliantly clever illustrations to Pope’s Rape of the Lock – ‘Aubrey, I have made a very great mistake – you are a very great artist’ – a tribute which reduced the consumptive (and not always sober) genius to tears. Art historians can spot the influences on Beardsley’s work – some William Morris here, some Japanese prints there. Beardsley’s drawings, however, do not merely illustrate, they define their age, as with his design for a prospectus of The Yellow Book, showing an expensively dressed, semi-oriental courtesan perusing a brightly lit bookstall late at night while from within the shop the elderly pierrot gazes at her furiously, quizzically.

In the university prospectus, an italic script over a picture of the Firth of Forth: Philosophy is learning how to die. Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be.

In the absence of an established distribution network, he built his own—a financial ‘Ho Chi MinhTrail’ between Dublin and the four corners of the country to target the people directly. Couriers had to distribute the prospectus, promotional material and receipts for the Loan, and carry subscriptions (cheques, notes, coin, gold) back to Dublin.

À chaque porte qui s’ouvrait je voyais un nouveau monstre. Et puis, enfin, je tombai sur un pauvre idiot qui avait vraiment envie de se cultiver, et cela m’acheva. J’eus honte de moi, de mon pays, de ma race, de mon époque. Il me fallut un temps du diable pour le convaincre de ne pas acheter cette sacrée Encyclopédie. Il me demanda innocemment pourquoi, dans ce cas, j’avais frappé chez lui – et sans une minute d’hésitation je lui racontai un mensonge gros comme moi, un mensonge qui devait par la suite se révéler exact : une grande vérité. Je lui racontai que je faisais semblant de vendre cette Encyclopédie, à seule fin de rencontrer des gens et d’écrire à leur propos. Cela eut le don de l’intéresser énormément, plus même que l'Encyclopédie. Il voulut savoir ce que j’écrirais sur son compte – pouvais-je le lui dire ? Il m’a pris vingt ans de ma vie pour répondre à cette question. Mais la voici, ma réponse. « Si cela vous intéresse encore de le savoir, chez M. X., de Bayonne, voici... Je vous dois beaucoup parce que après ce mensonge que je vous avais raconté, en sortant de chez vous, je déchirai le prospectus que m’avait fourni l'Encyclopédie britannique et le jetai dans le caniveau. Je me dis que jamais plus je n’irais trouver les gens sous de faux prétextes, fût-ce pour leur distribuer la Sainte Bible. Jamais plus je n’irais rien vendre, dussé-je en crever de faim. Je rentre chez moi maintenant pour m’asseoir à mon bureau et coucher sur le papier ce que je sais des gens. Et si quelqu’un cogne à ma porte et vient me vendre quelque chose, entrez donc, lui dirai-je, pourquoi diable faites-vous ce métier ? Et s’il me dit que c’est parce qu’il a besoin de vivre, je lui offrirai tout l’argent que j’ai en poche et le supplierai de réfléchir encore une fois à ce qu’il fait. Je voudrais empêcher le plus de gens possible de feindre d’avoir à faire ceci ou cela pour gagner leur vie. Rien de plus faux. Mieux vaut encore crever vraiment de faim. Quiconque se laisse volontairement crever de faim ajoute une dent à l’engrenage du processus automatique. J’aimerais mieux voir un homme empoigner son fusil et tuer son prochain pour se procurer la nourriture qui lui manque, que d’entretenir le processus automatique en prétendant que cet homme doit gagner sa vie. Voilà ma réponse, cher M. X. »

the Prospectus judges it “quite likely” that methods would be found to extract uranium from lower-grade ores. It mentions thorium as an alternative and much more abundant reactor fuel. (It still is, having not yet been used commercially as reactor fuel.)

Such was classical Marxism’s prospectus for the post-revolutionary future. Leninist Marxism’s innovation was to interpose—for a backward country like Russia—a whole historical epoch between the proletarian revolution and the advent of socialism.

mutual fund prospectus is the single best way to find out about the objectives, costs, past performance figures, and other important information about any mutual fund you’re considering investing in.

The company is a Johnny-One-Note, relying on one customer (or a handful) for most of its revenues. In October 1999, fiber-optics maker Sycamore Networks, Inc. sold stock to the public for the first time. The prospectus revealed that one customer, Williams Communications, accounted for 100% of Sycamore’s $11 million in total revenues. Traders blithely valued Sycamore’s shares at $15 billion. Unfortunately, Williams went bankrupt just over two years later. Although Sycamore picked up other customers, its stock lost 97% between 2000 and 2002.

What else should you watch for? Most fund buyers look at past performance first, then at the manager’s reputation, then at the riskiness of the fund, and finally (if ever) at the fund’s expenses.8 The intelligent investor looks at those same things—but in the opposite order. Since a fund’s expenses are far more predictable than its future risk or return, you should make them your first filter. There’s no good reason ever to pay more than these levels of annual operating expenses, by fund category: Taxable and municipal bonds: 0.75% U.S. equities (large and mid-sized stocks): 1.0% High-yield (junk) bonds: 1.0% U.S. equities (small stocks): 1.25% Foreign stocks: 1.50%9 Next, evaluate risk. In its prospectus (or buyer’s guide), every fund must show a bar graph displaying its worst loss over a calendar quarter. If you can’t stand losing at least that much money in three months, go elsewhere. It’s also worth checking a fund’s Morningstar rating. A leading investment research firm, Morningstar awards “star ratings” to funds, based on how much risk they took to earn their returns (one star is the worst, five is the best). But, just like past performance itself, these ratings look back in time; they tell you which funds were the best, not which are going to be. Five-star funds, in fact, have a disconcerting habit of going on to underperform one-star funds. So first find a low-cost fund whose managers are major shareholders, dare to be different, don’t hype their returns, and have shown a willingness to shut down before they get too big for their britches. Then, and only then, consult their Morningstar rating.10 Finally, look at past performance, remembering that it is only a pale predictor of future returns. As we’ve already seen, yesterday’s winners often become tomorrow’s losers. But researchers have shown that one thing is almost certain: Yesterday’s losers almost never become tomorrow’s winners. So avoid funds with consistently poor past returns—especially if they have above-average annual expenses.

end of the class he stood in the doorway to block the Frenchman’s exit. “You’re going around the world showing people pictures of how to use condoms?” Cool B asked mockingly. “I’ll show you what to do.” He snatched away the man’s prospectus and, reading from the text, improvised an anti-AIDS rap on the spot in the manner of LL Cool J. The Frenchman was impressed. Within a couple of days, he had arranged for Cool B to record the rap at a downtown nightclub, and the song made him a momentary celebrity among Abidjan youth. It also began his long association with white people—among them Petra, his girlfriend, who eventually went back to Germany, and Éliane de Latour, a French filmmaker who employed him for a while as a researcher on a feature about Abidjan youth. Cool B keeps pictures of them on his wall, and he tries to figure out why, in spite of these connections, he remains stuck in Koumassi. He spends his ample free time and his limited funds at a local Internet café, surfing international dating sites and chat rooms where people he knows have found marriage opportunities that got them out of Africa. Or he visits

Burlington, Vermont, Nouvelle-Angleterre, était considéré par le reste du pays comme un trou perdu. Charmant, mais tellement ennuyeux. Ça me convenait plutôt bien au début, du moins jusqu'à ce que je réalise que ce paisible petit bled abritait en secret l'une des plus vieilles communautés surnaturelles du pays. Vous me direz, rien n'est parfait... peut être, mais si j'avais su, j'y aurais regardé à deux fois avant de de venir m'y installer six mois plus tôt. Les humains de l'office du tourisme auraient dû le mentionner dans leurs prospectus. Ça aurait donné un truc du genre : "Venez visiter Burlington, l'été, vous pourrez pratiquer les sports nautiques ou pêcher sur le lac Champlain et l'hiver, vous pourrez faire du ski ou de la randonnée en raquettes, ah, au fait, n'oubliez pas d'amener avec vous quelques fusils munis de balles d'argent, un ou deux pieux, trois ou quatre lance-flammes, les habitants du coin sont du genre irritable...

[T]here is now a void at the heart of everything. But then there is so much more of everything now!