Purchasing Stock Quotes

We need a moderately-priced stock market… The market, like the Lord, helps those who help themselves. But, unlike the Lord, the market does not forgive those who know not what they do. For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments.

The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton and rum.

Moderately fast growers (20 to 25 percent) in nongrowth industries are ideal investments. • Look for companies with niches. • When purchasing depressed stocks in troubled companies, seek out the ones with the superior financial positions and avoid the ones with loads of bank debt. • Companies that have no debt can’t go bankrupt. • Managerial ability may be important, but it’s quite difficult to assess. Base your purchases on the company’s prospects, not on the president’s resume or speaking ability. • A lot of money can be made when a troubled company turns around. • Carefully consider the price-earnings ratio. If the stock is grossly overpriced, even if everything else goes right, you won’t make any money. • Find a story line to follow as a way of monitoring a company’s progress. • Look for companies that consistently buy back their own shares.

He had, with great cost, acquired a vast stock of wisdom, which is not soon lost when it is purchased so dear.

students need only two well-taught courses—How to Value a Business, and How to Think About Market Prices. Your goal as an investor should simply be to purchase, at a rational price, a part interest in an easily-understandable business whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially higher five, ten and twenty years from now. Over time, you will find only a few companies that meet these standards—so when you see one that qualifies, you should buy a meaningful amount of stock. You must also resist the temptation to stray from your guidelines: If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes. Put together a portfolio of companies whose aggregate earnings march upward over the years, and so also will the portfolio’s market value. Though it’s seldom recognized, this is the exact approach

A man sits in an office deciding what stocks to buy. He imagines, no doubt, that he is planning his purchases according to his own judgment. In actual fact his judgment is a melange of impressions stamped on his mind by outside influences which unconsciously control his thought. He buys a certain railroad stock because it was in the headlines yesterday and hence is the one which comes most prominently to his mind; because he has a pleasant recollection of a good dinner on one of its fast trains; because it has a liberal labor policy, a reputation for honesty; because he has been told that J. P. Morgan owns some of its shares.

Yet they believe blindly in the stock market, and in the abilities of their pension plan manager. Why do they do so? Because they accept that this is what people should do with their savings, because "experts" tell them so. The doubt their own sense, but not for a second do they doubt their automatic purchases in the stock market.

Your goal as an investor should be simply to purchase, at a rational price, a part interest in an easily understood business whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially higher, five, ten, and twenty years from now. Over time, you will find only a few companies that meet those standards-so when you see one that qualifies, you should buy a meaningful amount of stock.

Most frequently given of such reasons is the conviction that a general stock market decline of some proportion is somewhere in the offing. In the preceding chapter I tried to show that postponing an attractive purchase because of fear of what the general market might do will, over the years, prove very costly. This is because the investor is ignoring a powerful influence about which he has positive knowledge through fear of a less powerful force about which, in the present state of human knowledge, he and everyone else is largely guessing.

The accepted version of history is that the Federal Reserve was created to stabilize our economy. One of the most widely-used textbooks on this subject says: "It sprang from the panic of 1907, with its alarming epidemic of bank failures: the country was fed up once and for all with the anarchy of unstable private banking."23 Even the most naive student must sense a grave contradiction between this cherished view and the System's actual performance. Since its inception, it has presided over the crashes of 1921 and 1929; the Great Depression of '29 to '39; recessions in '53, '57, '69, '75, and '81; a stock market "Black Monday" in '87; and a 1000% inflation which has destroyed 90% of the dollar's purchasing power.24

that a single independent workman has stock sufficient both to purchase the materials of his work, and to maintain himself till it be completed. He is both master and workman, and enjoys the whole produce of his own labour, or the whole value which it adds to the materials upon which it is bestowed. It includes what are usually two distinct r

The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few people as possible escape the common misfortune. The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost. The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. The bargains then suffered a ruinous fall. Even the man who waited for volume of trading to return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next 24 months. The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.

Assets are the new savings bank.

We added that the stock component should carry a fair degree of protection against a loss of purchasing power caused by large-scale inflation.

All things considered, the third best investment I ever made was the purchase of my home, though I would have made far more money had I instead rented and used the purchase money to buy stocks.

Adopting and extending the existing system of mamluk recruitment, he purchased thousands of young male slaves, drawn from Kipchak Turkish and, later, Caucasian stock. These boys were trained and indoctrinated as mamluk troops, and then at the age of eighteen freed to serve their masters within the Mamluk sultanate. This approach created a constantly self-rejuvenating military force–what one modern historian has called a ‘one-generation nobility’–because children born of mamluks were not regarded as being part of the martial elite, although they were permitted to enrol in the army’s second-tier halqa reserves.

In reality, many universities have direct investments in corporate America in the form of substantial stock portfolios. By purchase and persuasion, our institutions of higher learning are wedded to institutions of higher earning.

Independent bookstore are a valuable asset to any city, town or village. They offer us the latest literary releases, a meeting point where authors share their work and meet new readers and fans. They offer us a rich ‘bookish’ environment in which to browse before we buy. I love to sip coffee and leaf through my new purchase. I can be sure that independent booksellers know their stock, they suggest new authors and broaden my reading. Along with public libraries they are key to our communities.

By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a grey-hound, or a grey-hound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd's dog. Those different tribes of animals, however, though all of the same species are of scarce any use to one another. The strength of the mastiff is not in the least supported either by the swiftness of the greyhound, or by the sagacity of the spaniel, or by the docility of the shepherd's dog. The effects of those different geniuses and talents, for want of the power or disposition to barter and exchange, cannot be brought into a common stock, and do not in the least contribute to the better accommodation and conveniency of the species. Each animal is still obliged to support and defend itself, separately and independently, and derives no sort of advantage from that variety of talents with which nature has distinguished its fellows. Among men, on the contrary, the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another; the different produces of their respective talents, by the general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, being brought, as it were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever part of the produce of other men's talents he has occasion for.

Picture salvation as a house that you live in. It provides you with protection. It is stocked with food and drink that will last forever. It never decays or crumbles. Its windows open onto vistas of glory. God built it at great cost to Himself and to His Son, and He gave it to you. The purchase agreement is called a 'new covenant.' The terms read: 'This house shall become and remain yours if you will receive it as a gift and take delight in the Father and the Son as they inhabit the house with you. You shall not profane the house of God by sheltering other gods nor turn our heart away after other treasures.' Would it not be foolish to say yes to this agreement, and then hire a lawyer to draw up an amortization schedule with monthly payments in the hopes of somehow balancing accounts. You would be treating the house no longer as a gift, but a purchase. God would no longer be the free benefactor. And you would be enslaved to a new set of demands that he never dreamed of putting on you. If grace is to be free - which is the very meaning of grace - we cannot view it as something to be repaid.

a person who is free to make a $20,000 purchase of a car as a customer, might not be free to buy an office chair for $500 as an employee. Little wonder that big companies grow more slowly than small ones (firms whose chief executives attend the annual World Economic Forum schmooze-fest in Davos tend to underperform the stock market), and big public bodies have worse reputations than small ones.

On September 20, the New York Stock Exchange halted trading for ten days. Grant received emergency pleas for purchases of Treasury bonds to add liquidity to national banks, while Thomas Murphy, the former New York customs collector, wired: “Relief must come immediately or hundreds if not thousands of our best men will be ruined.” Not since 1837 had such a spasm of fear flashed through Wall Street.

suggest funding college, or at least the first step of college, with an Educational Savings Account (ESA), funded in a growth-stock mutual fund. The Educational Savings Account, nicknamed the Education IRA, grows tax-free when used for higher education. If you invest $2,000 a year from birth to age eighteen in prepaid tuition, that would purchase about $72,000 in tuition, but through an ESA in mutual funds averaging 12 percent, you would have $126,000 tax-free. The ESA currently allows you to invest $2,000 per year, per child, if your household income is under $220,000 per year. If you start investing early, your child can go to virtually any college if you save $166.67 per month ($2,000/year). For most of you, Baby Step Five is handled if you start an ESA fully funded and your child is under eight. If your children are older, or you have aspirations of expensive schools, graduate school, or PhD programs that you pay for, you will have to save more than the ESA will allow. I would still start with the ESA if the income limits don’t keep you out. Start with the ESA because you can invest it anywhere, in any fund or any mix of funds, and change it at will. It is the most flexible, and you have the most control.

People have been stockpiling necessities such as toilet paper, bread, water, and junk food. I never understood the whole bread thing, because no one ever seems to purchase anything to go with the bread. Peanut butter is still stocked, as jelly. What do these people do with their bread in the event of an emergency? Huddle down beside their piles of toilet paper and eat plain slices of bread until help arrives?

The buggy should be here soon. Do you have your suitcase packed?” “So eager to get rid of me?” “Eager?” he repeated, rolling back the sleeves of his favorite indigo coat. “My kitchen will be empty in two days and I’ll be forced to purchase my own groceries. How could I be eager for that?” Ceony smiled and scooped out more egg. “You could always have Jonto cook your meals.” In fact, Emery once had tried to get Jonto to cook his meals. It had taken the paper magician two days to reconstruct the right hand and arm of the paper skeleton, which had burned off after Jonto attempted to light the coals in the oven. “I’ll be sure to stock up on sandwich supplies,” Emery murmured. And all you’ll miss is the food, hm?” His eyes glimmered. “I may miss the mid-night companionship.” Ceony flushed. “Emery Thane!” That was one time. Emery just chuckled, the cursed man. 

Investing is an activity in which consumption today is foregone in an attempt to allow greater consumption at a later date. “Risk” is the possibility that this objective won’t be attained. By that standard, purportedly “risk-free” long-term bonds in 2012 were a far riskier investment than a long- term investment in common stocks. At that time, even a 1% annual rate of inflation between 2012 and 2017 would have decreased the purchasing-power of the government bond

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? The lessons of market history are clear. Styles and fashions in investors’ evaluations of securities can and often do play a critical role in the pricing of securities. The stock market at times conforms well to the castle-in-the-air theory. For this reason, the game of investing can be extremely dangerous. Another lesson that cries out for attention is that investors should be very wary of purchasing today’s hot “new issue.” Most initial public offerings underperform the stock market as a whole. And if you buy the new issue after it begins trading, usually at a higher price, you are even more certain to lose. Investors would be well advised to treat new issues with a healthy dose of skepticism. Certainly investors in the past have built many castles in the air with IPOs. Remember that the major sellers of the stock of IPOs are the managers of the companies themselves. They try to time their sales to coincide with a peak in the prosperity of their companies or with the height of investor enthusiasm for some current fad. In such cases, the urge to get on the bandwagon—even in high-growth industries—produced a profitless prosperity for investors.

The average well-selected secondary company may be fully as promising as the average industrial leader. What the smaller concern lacks in inherent stability it may readily make up in superior possibilities of growth. Consequently it may appear illogical to many readers to term “unintelligent” the purchase of such secondary issues at their full “enterprise value.” We think that the strongest logic is that of experience. Financial history says clearly that the investor may expect satisfactory results, on the average, from secondary common stocks only if he buys them for less than their value to a private owner, that is, on a bargain basis.

With his free hand, Thomas produces a small key. It’s like an elevator key, one of those round, single-purpose gizmos that don’t seem to have a reason for being except in an elevator, a device that brings to mind all the other silly little inventions: can openers, lemon zesters, melon ballers. Things that do only one thing. We have so many of them. Where do we get this shit? Bridal shower and wedding gifts, stocking stuffers, spur-of-the-moment purchases at Ikea. They’re all so goddamned useless, hidden in the backs of kitchen drawers, taken for granted and never taken out. This is what goes through my mind as Thomas frees me with the high-tech equivalent of a can opener.

We have advised against the purchase at “full prices” of three important categories of securities: (1) foreign bonds, (2) ordinary preferred stocks, and (3) secondary common stocks, including, of course, original offerings of such issues. By “full prices” we mean prices close to par for bonds or preferred stocks, and prices that represent about the fair business value of the enterprise in the case of common stocks. The greater number of defensive investors are to avoid these categories regardless of price; the enterprising investor is to buy them only when obtainable at bargain prices—which we define as prices not more than two-thirds of the appraisal value of the securities.

If yet I have not all thy love, Dear, I shall never have it all, I cannot breathe one other sigh, to move, Nor can entreat one other tear to fall, And all my treasure, which should purchase thee, Sighs, tears, and oaths, and letters I have spent. Yet no more can be due to me, Than at the bargain made was meant; If then thy gift of love were partial, That some to me, some should to others fall, Dear, I shall never have thee all. Or if then thou gravest me all, All was but all, which thou hadst then; But if in thy heart, since, there be or shall New love created be, by other men, Which have their stocks entire, and can in tears, In sighs, in oaths, and letters outbid me, This new love may beget new fears, For, this love was not vowed by thee. And yet it was, thy gift being general; The ground, thy heart, is mine, whatever shall Grow there, dear, I should have it all. Yet I would not have all yet; He that hath all can have no more, And since my love doth every day admit New growth, thou shouldst have new rewards in store; Thou canst not every day give me thy heart, If thou canst give it, then thou never gavest it: Love's riddles are, that though thy heart depart, It stays at home, and thou with losing savest it: But we will have a way more liberal, Than changing hearts, to join them, so we shall Be one, and one another's all.

Each woman was valued at 150 pounds of tobacco, which was the same price exacted from Jane Dickenson when she eventually purchased her freedom. Not surprisingly, then, with their value calculated in tobacco, women in Virginia were treated as fertile commodities. They came with testimonials to their moral character, impressing on “industrious Planters” that they were not being sold a bad bill of goods. One particular planter wrote that an earlier shipment of females was “corrupt,” and he expected a new crop that was guaranteed healthy and favorably disposed for breeding. Accompanying the female cargo were some two hundred head of cattle, a reminder that the Virginia husbandman needed both species of breeding stock to recover his English roots.37 Despite

There was a small mini-market serving the area. It was sparsely stocked, a few bags of crisps and boxes of cereal displayed under harsh strip lights that spat and fizzed. Alcohol and cigarettes, however, were well provided for, secured behind the Perspex screen from behind which the owner surveyed his business with suspicious eyes. Milton nodded to the man as he made his way inside and received nothing but a wary tip of the head in return. He made his way through the shop, picking out cleaning products, a carton of orange juice and a bag of ice. He took his goods to the owner and arranged them on the lip of counter ahead of the screen. As the man rang his purchases up, Milton looked behind him to shelves that were loaded with alcohol: gin, vodka, whiskey.

Even if index numbers cannot fulfill the demands that theory has to make, they can still, in spite of their fundamental shortcomings and the inexactness of the methods by which they are actually determined, perform useful workaday services for the politician. If we have no other aim in view than the comparison of points of time that lie close to one another, then the errors that are involved in every method of calculating numbers may be so far ignored as to allow us to draw certain rough conclusions from them. Thus, for example, it becomes possible to a certain extent to span the temporal gap that lies, in a period of variation in the value of money, between movements of Stock Exchange rates and movements of the purchasing power that is expressed in the prices of commodities.

In the case that upheld the second AAA, Wickard v. Filburn, (1942), a farmer had been fined for planting 23 acres of wheat, instead of the eleven acres the government had allotted him—notwithstanding that the "excess" wheat had been consumed on his own farm. Now how in the world, the farmer wanted to know, can it be said that the wheat I feed my own stock is in interstate commerce? That's easy, the Court said. If you had not used your own wheat for feed, you might have bought feed from someone else, and that purchase might have affected the price of wheat that was transported in interstate commerce! By this bizarre reasoning the Court made the commerce clause as wide as the world and nullified the Constitution's clear reservation to the States of jurisdiction over agriculture. The

Basically, Graham breaks the art of investing down into two simple variables – price and value. Value is what a business is worth. Price is what you have to pay to get it. Given the stock market’s manic-depressive behavior, numerous occasions arise where a business’ market price is distinctly out of line with its true business value. In such instances, an investor may be able to purchase a dollar of value for just 50 cents. Note that there is no mention here of interest rates, economic forecasts, technical charts, market cycles, etc. The only issues are price and value. I should also note that Graham emphasizes a large margin of safety. The strategy is not to buy a dollar of value for 97 cents. Rather, the gap should be dramatic so as to absorb the effects of miscalculation and worse-than-average luck.

What does it mean when customers don't take a deal? Does it mean that they didn't want the product as much as they did want the one they bought? Is a negative signal as strong as a positive one? Perhaps they like Champagne but already have a lot in stock. Maybe they just didn't see your e-mail newsletter that month. There are a lot of reasons why someone doesn't take an action, but there are few reasons why someone does. In other words, you should care about purchases, not non-purchases. The fancy way to say this is that there's an “asymmetry” in the data. The 1s are worth more than the 0s. If a customer matches another customer on three 1s, that's more important than matching some other customer on three 0s. What stinks though is that while the 1s are so important, there are very few of them in the data—hence, the term “sparse.

The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton and rum. They returned to Europe, sold the sugar and cotton for a good price, and then sailed to Africa to begin another round. The shareholders were very pleased with this arrangement. Throughout the eighteenth century the yield on slave-trade investments was about 6 per cent a year – they were extremely profitable, as any

The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton and rum. They returned to Europe, sold the sugar and cotton for a good price, and then sailed to Africa to begin another round. The shareholders were very pleased with this arrangement. Throughout the eighteenth century the yield on slave-trade investments was about 6 per cent a year – they were extremely profitable, as any modern consultant would be quick to admit.

The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton and rum. They returned to Europe, sold the sugar and cotton for a good price, and then sailed to Africa to begin another round. The shareholders were very pleased with this arrangement. Throughout the eighteenth century the yield on slave-trade investments was about 6 per cent a year – they were extremely profitable, as any modern consultant would be quick to admit. This is the fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism. It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner. On the contrary, the craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way.

I heard of him first in rather a romantic manner, from a lady who owes to him the happiness of her life. This, briefly, is his story. Some years ago, he loved a young Russian lady, of moderate fortune; and having amassed a considerable sum in prize−money, the father of the girl consented to the match. He saw his mistress once before the destined ceremony; but she was bathed in tears, and, throwing herself at his feet, entreated him to spare her, confessing at the same time that she loved another, but that he was poor, and that her father would never consent to the union. My generous friend reassured the suppliant, and on being informed of the name of her lover, instantly abandoned his pursuit. He had already bought a farm with his money, on which he had designed to pass the remainder of his life; but he bestowed the whole on his rival, together with the remains of his prize−money to purchase stock, and then himself solicited the young woman's father to consent to her marriage with her lover. But the old man decidedly refused, thinking himself bound in honour to my friend; who, when he found the father inexorable, quitted his country, nor returned until he heard that his former mistress was married according to her inclinations. "What a noble fellow!" you will exclaim. He is so;

A few years ago my friend Jon Brooks supplied this great illustration of skewed interpretation at work. Here’s how investors react to events when they’re feeling good about life (which usually means the market has been rising): Strong data: economy strengthening—stocks rally Weak data: Fed likely to ease—stocks rally Data as expected: low volatility—stocks rally Banks make $4 billion: business conditions favorable—stocks rally Banks lose $4 billion: bad news out of the way—stocks rally Oil spikes: growing global economy contributing to demand—stocks rally Oil drops: more purchasing power for the consumer—stocks rally Dollar plunges: great for exporters—stocks rally Dollar strengthens: great for companies that buy from abroad—stocks rally Inflation spikes: will cause assets to appreciate—stocks rally Inflation drops: improves quality of earnings—stocks rally Of course, the same behavior also applies in the opposite direction. When psychology is negative and markets have been falling for a while, everything is capable of being interpreted negatively. Strong economic data is seen as likely to make the Fed withdraw stimulus by raising interest rates, and weak data is taken to mean companies will have trouble meeting earnings forecasts. In other words, it’s not the data or events; it’s the interpretation. And that fluctuates with swings in psychology.

When we talk about finding or having found our soul mate (if we do), we do not believe ourselves to be immersed in the capitalist economy. But this is an even more important terrain for capitalism than the convenience store where we buy a soda and candy bar or the stock exchange floor where companies are financed. The idea of the soul mate plays a crucial role in the promulgation of consumption. If I believe that a perfect commodity exists in the romantic field, this changes my relationship to all commodities. Commodities become more attractive insofar as each one stands in for the perfect partner. Though a hammer at the hardware store most likely cannot function as my soul mate, I will find more pleasure in purchasing it with the idea of an ideal commodity informing the purchase, and this is what the soul mate provides. That is to say, the idea of the soul mate underwrites all consumption within the capitalist universe. The soul mate is the commodity in the form of the subject’s complement. This is why the idea of the soul mate has such importance for capitalism. The subject experiences itself as lacking whenever it desires, and no object can fill this lack. But the promise of the soul mate is the promise of completion, an object that would complement the lacking subject perfectly and thereby ameliorate its lack. No such complement exists outside of ideological fantasies, but capitalism requires subjects who invest themselves in such fantasies.

Decouplers often trip up on this step in two ways. First, they are overly generic in articulating the CVC. When mapping the process of buying a car, auto executives tend to describe it as: feel the need to buy car > become aware of a car brand > develop an interest in the brand > visit the dealer > purchase the car. This is a start, but it is not specific enough. Decouplers must ask: When do people actually need a new car? How exactly do people become aware of car brands? How do people become interested in a make or model? And so on. The generic process of awareness, interest, desire, and purchase isn’t specific enough to help. Decouplers also flounder by failing to identify all the relevant stages in the value chain. For the car-buying process, a better description of the CVC might be: become aware that your car lease will expire in one month > feel the need to purchase a new car > develop a heightened interest in car ads > visit car manufacturers’ websites > create a set of two or three brands of interest > visit third-party auto websites > compare options of cars in the same category > choose a model > shop online for the best price > visit the nearest dealer to see if they have the model in stock > see if they can beat the best online price > test-drive the cars > decide about financing, warranty, and other add-ons > negotiate a final price > sign the contract > pick up the car > use it > wait for the lease to expire again. With this far more detailed CVC, we can fully appreciate the complexity of the car-buying

Blues Elizabeth Alexander, 1962 I am lazy, the laziest girl in the world. I sleep during the day when I want to, ‘til my face is creased and swollen, ‘til my lips are dry and hot. I eat as I please: cookies and milk after lunch, butter and sour cream on my baked potato, foods that slothful people eat, that turn yellow and opaque beneath the skin. Sometimes come dinnertime Sunday I am still in my nightgown, the one with the lace trim listing because I have not mended it. Many days I do not exercise, only consider it, then rub my curdy belly and lie down. Even my poems are lazy. I use syllabics instead of iambs, prefer slant to the gong of full rhyme, write briefly while others go for pages. And yesterday, for example, I did not work at all! I got in my car and I drove to factory outlet stores, purchased stockings and panties and socks with my father’s money. To think, in childhood I missed only one day of school per year. I went to ballet class four days a week at four-forty-five and on Saturdays, beginning always with plie, ending with curtsy. To think, I knew only industry, the industry of my race and of immigrants, the radio tuned always to the station that said, Line up your summer job months in advance. Work hard and do not shame your family, who worked hard to give you what you have. There is no sin but sloth. Burn to a wick and keep moving. I avoided sleep for years, up at night replaying evening news stories about nearby jailbreaks, fat people who ate fried chicken and woke up dead. In sleep I am looking for poems in the shape of open V’s of birds flying in formation, or open arms saying, I forgive you, all.

There is no reason at all for thinking that the average intelligent investor, even with much devoted effort, can derive better results over the years from the purchase of growth stocks than the investment companies specializing in this area. Surely these organizations have more brains and better research facilities at their disposal than you do. Consequently we should advise against the usual type of growth-stock commitment for the enterprising investor.* This is one in which the excellent prospects are fully recognized in the market and already reflected in a current price-earnings ratio of, say, higher than 20. (For the defensive investor we suggested an upper limit of purchase price at 25 times average earnings of the past seven years. The two criteria would be about equivalent in most cases.)† The striking thing about growth stocks as a class is their tendency toward wide swings in market price. This is true of the largest and longest-established companies—such as General Electric and International Business Machines—and even more so of newer and smaller successful companies. They illustrate our thesis that the main characteristic of the stock market since 1949 has been the injection of a highly speculative element into the shares of companies which have scored the most brilliant successes, and which themselves would be entitled to a high investment rating. (Their credit standing is of the best, and they pay the lowest interest rates on their borrowings.) The investment caliber of such a company may not change over a long span of years, but the risk characteristics of its stock will depend on what happens to it in the stock market. The more enthusiastic the public grows about it, and the faster its advance as compared with the actual growth in its earnings, the riskier a proposition it becomes.

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The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

Our one recommendation is that all investors should be wary of new issues—which means, simply, that these should be subjected to careful examination and unusually severe tests before they are purchased. There are two reasons for this double caveat. The first is that new issues have special salesmanship behind them, which calls therefore for a special degree of sales resistance.* The second is that most new issues are sold under “favorable market conditions”—which means favorable for the seller and consequently less favorable for the buyer.† The effect of these considerations becomes steadily more important as we go down the scale from the highest-quality bonds through second-grade senior issues to common-stock flotations at the bottom.

Every person has short-term goals. Some are modest, such as setting aside money for a vacation next month or paying for medical bills. Other short-term goals are more ambitious, such as accruing funds for a down payment to purchase a new home within six months. Whatever the expense or purchase, you need a predictable accumulation of cash soon. If this sounds like your situation, stay away from the stock market!

My investment philosophy changed when I read Charles Ellis’ book Winning the Loser’s Game. The book was given to me by my employer at the time, Michael Goodman, founder of Wealthstream Advisors, Inc. Ellis convinced me that trying to beat the market is a losing proposition. In golf, par is a good score, and avoiding bogeys is more important than making birdies. Very few professional investors beat the market consistently, after accounting for the costs. The most important takeaway from Ellis’ books is that the market return is a good return. The proliferation of low-cost index funds means that the market return is ours for the taking, if only we accept it. I have not purchased an individual stock since reading that book.

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However, the risk of paying too high a price for good-quality stocks—while a real one—is not the chief hazard confronting the average buyer of securities. Observation over many years has taught us that the chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions. The purchasers view the current good earnings as equivalent to “earning power” and assume that prosperity is synonymous with safety.

For example, in 1602 when the United Dutch Chartered East India Company (Dutch East India Company, for short) became the first company to issue stock,1 the shares were extremely illiquid. When first issued, no stock market even existed, and purchasers were expected to hold on to the shares for 21 years, the length of time granted to the company by the Netherlands’ charter over trade in Asia. However, some investors wanted to sell their shares, perhaps to pay down debts, and so an informal market for the stock (the very first stock market) developed in the Amsterdam East India House. As more joint-stock equity companies were founded, this informal location grew, and was later formalized as the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, the oldest “modern” securities exchange in the world.2 Despite the structure of the shares of the Dutch East India Company not changing much, their market liquidity and trading volumes changed considerably.

Another lesson that cries out for attention is that investors should be very wary of purchasing today’s hot “new issue.” Most initial public offerings underperform the stock market as a whole. And if you buy the new issue after it begins trading, usually at a higher price, you are even more certain to lose.

If they follow our prescription they will confine themselves to high-grade bonds and the common stocks of leading corporations, preferably those that can be purchased at individual price levels that are not high in the light of experience and analysis.

We want products in stock and immediately available to customers, and we want minimal total inventory in order to keep associated holding costs, and thus prices, low. To achieve both, there is a right amount of inventory. We use historical purchase data to forecast customer demand for a product and expected variability in that demand. We use data on the historical performance of vendors to estimate replenishment times. We can determine where to stock the product within our fulfillment network based on inbound and outbound transportation costs, storage costs, and anticipated customer locations.

implied that “at normal levels of the market” the investor should be able to obtain an  initial  dividend  return  of  between  31⁄2%  and  41⁄2%  on  his  stock purchases, to which should be added a steady increase in underly- ing value (and in the “normal market price”) of a representative

There's an easy way to own a piece of every Dividend Aristocrat: just buy some shares of NOBL. It is the ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats ETF. It trades just like a stock, and you can purchase it using any brokerage account.

The typical real estate purchase was far more leveraged than the stocks purchased on margin in the run up to the 1929 crash. Putting 5 percent down on a house means the other 95 percent is borrowed.

All of the above brings us back to our conclusion that the investor has no sound basis for expecting more than an average overall return of, say, 8% on a portfolio of DJIA-type common stocks purchased at the late 1971 price level. But even if these expectations should prove to be understated by a substantial amount, the case would not be made for an all-stock investment program.

Look at stocks as part ownership of a business. 2. Look at Mr. Market—volatile stock price fluctuations—as your friend rather than your enemy. View risk as the possibility of permanent loss of purchasing power, and uncertainty as the unpredictability regarding the degree of variability in the possible range of outcomes. 3. Remember the three most important words in investing: “margin of safety.” 4. Evaluate any news item or event only in terms of its impact on (a) future interest rates and (b) the intrinsic value of the business, which is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out during its remaining life, adjusted for the uncertainty around receiving those cash flows. 5. Think in terms of opportunity costs when evaluating new ideas and keep a very high hurdle rate for incoming investments. Be unreasonable. When you look at a business and get a strong desire from within saying, “I wish I owned this business,” that is the kind of business in which you should be investing. A great investment idea doesn’t need hours to analyze. More often than not, it is love at first sight. 6. Think probabilistically rather than deterministically, because the future is never certain and it is really a set of branching probability streams. At the same time, avoid the risk of ruin, when making decisions, by focusing on consequences rather than just on raw probabilities in isolation. Some risks are just not worth taking, whatever the potential upside may be. 7. Never underestimate the power of incentives in any given situation. 8. When making decisions, involve both the left side of your brain (logic, analysis, and math) and the right side (intuition, creativity, and emotions). 9. Engage in visual thinking, which helps us to better understand complex information, organize our thoughts, and improve our ability to think and communicate. 10. Invert, always invert. You can avoid a lot of pain by visualizing your life after you have lost a lot of money trading or speculating using derivatives or leverage. If the visuals unnerve you, don’t do anything that could get you remotely close to reaching such a situation. 11. Vicariously learn from others throughout life. Embrace everlasting humility to succeed in this endeavor. 12. Embrace the power of long-term compounding. All the great things in life come from compound interest.

With the first banks opened on Monday, the afternoon brought another request from Roosevelt. Stating that he needed the tax revenue, he asked Congress that beer with alcohol content of up to 3.2 percent be made legal; the Eighteenth Amendment did not specify the percentage that constituted an intoxicating beverage. Congress complied. The House passed the bill the very next day with a vote count of 316–97, pushing it to the Senate. Wednesday brought good cheer: The stock market opened for the first time in Roosevelt’s presidency. In a single-day record, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained over 15 percent—a gain in total market value of $3 billion. By Thursday, for increased fiscal prudence, the Senate had added an exemption for wine to go with beer, but negotiated the alcohol content down to 3.05 percent. Throughout the week, banks were receiving net deposits rather than facing panicked withdrawals. Over the following weeks, the administration developed a sweeping farm package designed to “increase purchasing power of our farmers” and “relieve the pressure of farm mortgages.” To guarantee the safety of bank deposits, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created. To regulate the entire American stock and bond markets, the Exchange Act of 1933 required companies to report their financial condition accurately to the buying public, establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission. Safety nets such as Social Security for retirement and home loan guarantees for individuals would be added to the government’s portfolio of responsibilities within a couple of years. It was the largest peacetime escalation of government in American history.

The next time you go to the supermarket, look closely at a can of peas. Think about all the work that went into it—the farmers, truckers, and supermarket employees, the miners and metalworkers who made the can—and think how miraculous it is that you can buy this can for under a dollar. At every step of the way, competition among suppliers rewarded those whose innovations shaved a penny off the cost of getting that can to you. If God is commonly thought to have created the world and then arranged it for our benefit, then the free market (and its invisible hand) is a pretty good candidate for being a god. You can begin to understand why libertarians sometimes have a quasi-religious faith in free markets. Now let’s do the devil’s work and spread chaos throughout the marketplace. Suppose that one day all prices are removed from all products in the supermarket. All labels too, beyond a simple description of the contents, so you can’t compare products from different companies. You just take whatever you want, as much as you want, and you bring it up to the register. The checkout clerk scans in your food insurance card and helps you fill out your itemized claim. You pay a flat fee of $10 and go home with your groceries. A month later you get a bill informing you that your food insurance company will pay the supermarket for most of the remaining cost, but you’ll have to send in a check for an additional $15. It might sound like a bargain to get a cartload of food for $25, but you’re really paying your grocery bill every month when you fork over $2,000 for your food insurance premium. Under such a system, there is little incentive for anyone to find innovative ways to reduce the cost of food or increase its quality. The supermarkets get paid by the insurers, and the insurers get their premiums from you. The cost of food insurance begins to rise as supermarkets stock only the foods that net them the highest insurance payments, not the foods that deliver value to you. As the cost of food insurance rises, many people can no longer afford it. Liberals (motivated by Care) push for a new government program to buy food insurance for the poor and the elderly. But once the government becomes the major purchaser of food, then success in the supermarket and food insurance industries depends primarily on maximizing yield from government payouts. Before you know it, that can of peas costs the government $30, and all of us are paying 25 percent of our paychecks in taxes just to cover the cost of buying groceries for each other at hugely inflated costs. That, says Goldhill, is what we’ve done to ourselves. As long as consumers are spared from taking price into account—that is, as long as someone else is always paying for your choices—things will get worse.

He analyzed the price performance of about 26,000 common stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, and the NASDAQ from 1926 to 2016. Unsurprisingly, 51 percent of these stocks lost their entire value over their lifetime. The majority of businesses should not be in business. Bessembinder’s research demonstrates that since the average common stock will lose its value over time, owning stocks can harm one’s wealth. Our default position should be not to buy. So we don’t. We are lazy. Can you guess the number of those 26,000 stocks, if purchased in 1926 and held until 2016 (or acquired or merged), that beat the market? The answer is about 8,000, or about 31 percent of the universe.17 Again, I was surprised at how high this number was.

Consider, for example, our life on Earth. We know that we have the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter. Unless we have an organic garden in our backyard, we have to purchase groceries from our neighborhood store. We take it for granted that food will be there, and we rarely think about the gratitude we owe the farmer, the trucker, the store owner, the stock person, the cashier, the car manufacturer, and the list goes on. Similar arguments can be offered for clothing and shelter.

If the buyers believe that they can sell assets to other buyers at a higher price, then the purchase price becomes irrelevant.

Defensive investors, as we have defined them, will not ordinarily be equipped to pass independent judgment on the security recommendations made by their advisers. But they can be explicit—and even repetitiously so—in stating the kind of securities they want to buy. If they follow our prescription they will confine themselves to high-grade bonds and the common stocks of leading corporations, preferably those that can be purchased at individual price levels that are not high in the light of experience and analysis.

To conclude this section, let us mention briefly three supplementary concepts or practices for the defensive investor. The first is the purchase of the shares of well-established investment funds as an alternative to creating his own common-stock portfolio. He might also utilize one of the “common trust funds,” or “commingled funds,” operated by trust companies and banks in many states; or, if his funds are substantial, use the services of a recognized investment-counsel firm. This will give him professional administration of his investment program along standard lines. The third is the device of “dollar-cost averaging,” which means simply that the practitioner invests in common stocks the same number of dollars each month or each quarter. In this way he buys more shares when the market is low than when it is high, and he is likely to end up with a satisfactory overall price for all his holdings. Strictly speaking, this method is an application of a broader approach known as “formula investing.” The latter was already alluded to in our suggestion that the investor may vary his holdings of common stocks between the 25% minimum and the 75% maximum, in inverse relationship to the action of the market. These ideas have merit for the defensive investor, and they will be discussed more amply in later chapters.

Coke is a special kind of dividend stock. It is a Dividend Aristocrat, one of an elite group of companies that have raised their dividends every year for the past 25 years. Other Dividend Aristocrats include the Colgate-Palmolive Company, Johnson & Johnson, and McDonald's. There's an easy way to own a piece of every Dividend Aristocrat: just buy some shares of NOBL. It is the ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats ETF. It trades just like a stock, and you can purchase it using any brokerage account.

This record may be regarded as a persuasive argument for the principle of regular monthly purchases of strong common stocks through thick and thin—a program known as “dollar-cost averaging.

The larger truth that I failed to see turned out to be another of those paradoxes—like the discounters’ principle of the less you charge, the more you’ll earn. And here it is: the more you share profits with your associates—whether it’s in salaries or incentives or bonuses or stock discounts—the more profit will accrue to the company. Why? Because the way management treats the associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the customers. And if the associates treat the customers well, the customers will return again and again, and that is where the real profit in this business lies, not in trying to drag strangers into your stores for one-time purchases based on splashy sales or expensive advertising. Satisfied, loyal, repeat customers are at the heart of Wal-Mart’s spectacular profit margins,

We fundamentally changed the point of view of the business from customer-oriented to buyer-oriented. I put our buyers in charge of the company. From 1958 through 1976, we tried to carry what the customers asked for, given the limits of our small stores and other operational parameters. Each store manager had great latitude in what was carried and from what supplier it was ordered. There was very little central distribution except for Trader Joe’s labeled California wines or imports. Each store probably had access to ten thousand stock keeping units (SKUs), of which about three thousand were actually stocked in any given week. By the time I left in 1989, we were down to a band of 1,100 to 1,500 SKUs, all of which were delivered through a central distribution system. The managers no longer had any buying discretion and there were no “DSDs,” or direct store deliveries. And along the way not only did we drop a lot of products that our customers would have liked us to sell, even at not-outstanding prices, but we stopped cashing checks in excess of the amount of purchase, we stopped all full-case discounts, and we persistently shortened the hours. We violated every received-wisdom of retailing except one: we delivered great value, which is where most retailers fail.

Arbitrages: The purchase of a security and the simultaneous sale of one or more other securities into which it was to be exchanged under a plan of reorganization, merger, or the like. Liquidations: Purchase of shares which were to receive one or more cash payments in liquidation of the company’s assets. Operations of these two classes were selected on the twin basis of (a) a calculated annual return of 20% or more, and (b) our judgment that the chance of a successful outcome was at least four out of five. Related Hedges: The purchase of convertible bonds or convertible preferred shares, and the simultaneous sale of the common stock into which they were exchangeable. The position was established at close to a parity basis—i.e., at a small maximum loss if the senior issue had actually to be converted and the operation closed out in that way. But a profit would be made if the common stock fell considerably more than the senior issue, and the position closed out in the market. Net-Current-Asset (or “Bargain”) Issues: The idea here was to acquire as many issues as possible at a cost for each of less than their book value in terms of net-current-assets alone—i.e., giving no value to the plant account and other assets. Our purchases were made typically at two-thirds or less of such stripped-down asset value. In most years we carried a wide diversification here—at least 100 different issues.

Stock Guide material includes “Earnings and Dividend Rankings,” which are based on stability and growth of these factors for the past eight years. (Thus price attractiveness does not enter here.) We include the S & P rankings in our Table 15-1. Ten of the 15 issues are ranked B+ (= average) and one (American Maize) is given the “high” rating of A. If our enterprising investor wanted to add a seventh mechanical criterion to his choice, by considering only issues ranked by Standard & Poor’s as average or better in quality, he might still have about 100 such issues to choose from. One might say that a group of issues, of at least average quality, meeting criteria of financial condition as well, purchasable at a low multiplier of current earnings and below asset value, should offer good promise of satisfactory investment results.

On June 9, 2021 President Biden dutifully reiterated the US government’s commitment to procure approximately 1.7 million courses of the NIAID-funded drug from Merck.81 BARDA collaborated with a confederacy of other shady Defense Department operatives, including the DoD Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense (JPEO-CBRND) and the Army Contracting Command, on the $1.2 billion purchase. Not only was the drug developed with taxpayer money, but its $712 per dose price to the taxpayer is forty times more than Merck’s $17.64 cost of production. Merck, which expects to make $7 billion per year on the new blockbuster, saw its stock price spike on news of the government contract and after President Biden’s televised plug.

2.50% and 4.50% today, it is probably reasonably fairly priced (in the current interest rate environment). If the dividend yield is below 2.50%, the stock is probably over-priced, and you should wait to purchase it. If the dividend yield is over 4.50%, there is probably something wrong. Either the company has an enormous amount of debt or underfunded pension obligations (like AT&T), which makes the stock more risky. Or the market is pricing in the chance of a dividend cut. Either way, you are better off sticking with the 2.50% to 4.50% dividend yield range. That’s where the more normal healthy companies will be found.

You can just buy the ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats ETF. The ticker is NOBL, and this ETF (exchange-traded fund) trades just like a stock. You can purchase it using any brokerage account. Today NOBL trades at $62.65 per share. So if you have $1,000, you can buy 15.96 shares of NOBL (1000 divided by 62.65). You’ll pay an expense ratio of 0.35% to own this ETF. What this means is that if you invest $1,000 in this ETF, you will pay them $3.50 every year for the privilege of owning their ETF.

If our people had not gone to war without counting the cost, they were, nevertheless, involved in it without means of providing for its necessities. It has been heretofore stated that we had no powder-mills. It would be needless to say that the new-born Government had no depots of powder, but it may be well to add that, beyond the small supply required for sporting purposes, our local traders had no stock on hand. Having no manufacturing industries which required saltpeter, very little of that was purchasable in our markets. The same would have been the case in regard to sulphur, but for the fact that it had been recently employed in the clarification of sugar-cane juice, and thus a considerable amount of it was found in New Orleans.

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Eventually Bezos hopes to integrate the Amazon online store, Amazon Prime, Echo, and Amazon’s customer data analytics with the Whole Foods Market grocery chain, which Amazon bought in 2017. Bezos says that his purchase of the company was partly due to his admiration for the outlook of its founder, John Mackey. When he meets with the founder or chief executive of a company that Amazon is thinking of buying, Bezos tries to assess whether he or she is in it merely to make money or because of a true passion for serving customers. “I’m always trying to figure out one thing first and foremost: Is that person a missionary or a mercenary?” Bezos says. “The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or their service and love their customers and are trying to build a great service. By the way, the great paradox here is that it’s usually the missionaries who make more money.” Mackey struck him as a missionary, and his passion infused the Whole Foods ethos. “It’s a missionary company, and he’s a missionary guy.

The gun industry collectively reinforced Glock’s pitch that small handguns were the perfect response to crime-ridden streets. The prolific Massad Ayoob advised in Shooting Industry, a periodical aimed at gun retailers: “Customers come to you every day out of fear. Fear is what they read in the newspaper. Fear of what they watch on the 11 o’clock news. Fear of the terrible acts of violence they see on the street. Your job, in no uncertain terms, is to sell them confidence.… An impulse of fear has sent that customer to your shop, so you want a quality product in stock to satisfy the customer’s needs and complete the impulse purchase.

Know what an asset is: Stocks, bonds, mutual funds, royalties, income generating real estate and businesses that do not require your day-to-day management. To purchase something, assets must generate enough cash flow to cover the expenses

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The Admiralty commissioned John Byron to command a ship to do some preliminary exploration in the South Pacific while monitoring the effects of fresh provisions on the incidence of scurvy in his crew. It proved to be a short voyage returning in under two years, in April 1766—and Byron’s conclusions regarding antiscorbutics were sketchy and unreliable. The men had suffered terrible ravages from the disease, but owing to the Admiralty’s instructions for Byron to purchase and outfit the ship with fresh vegetables whenever convenient, there were not a large number of deaths. Byron ordered scurvy grass and coconuts for his men, and while he claimed that the scurvy grass was of “infinite service” it was the coconuts that saved them from certain death. “It is astonishing the effect these nuts alone had on those afflicted … . Many in the most violent pain imaginable … and thought to be in the last stage of that disorder, were in a few days by eating those nuts (tho’ at sea) so far relieved as to do their duty, and even to go aloft as well as they had done before.” For the return voyage, Byron stocked up on more than two thousand coconuts and kept scurvy blessedly at bay. Byron’s unscientific opinion that coconuts were a useful antiscorbutic was of little practical value to the Admiralty, however, as coconuts were not readily available in England. All in all, it was not a very illuminating trial.

reciprocal purchase agreements” to generate more than one-fifth of its revenues. These agreements, also referred to commonly as “swaps,” were the ultimate addiction of many of the companies that flamed out so spectacularly in 2001 and 2002. Basically, a swap was an agreement by two companies to purchase goods or services from each other at the same time, inflating both companies’ revenues without any true economic purpose being fulfilled.

It seemed at that time as if the whole nation had turned stockjobbers. Exchange Alley was every day blocked up by crowds, and Cornhill was impassable for the number of carriages. Everybody came to purchase stock. “Every fool aspired to be a knave.” In the words of a ballad, published at the time, and sung about the streets, [“A South Sea Ballad; or, Merry Remarks upon Exchange Alley Bubbles. To a new tune, called ‘The Grand Elixir; or, the Philosopher’s Stone Discovered.’“] Then stars and garters did appear Among the meaner rabble; To buy and sell, to see and hear, The Jews and Gentiles squabble. The greatest ladies thither came, And plied in chariots daily, Or pawned their jewels for a sum To venture in the Alley.

The GNP lumps together goods and bads. (If there are more car accidents and medical bills and repair bills, the GNP goes up.) It counts only marketed goods and services. (If all parents hired people to bring up their children, the GNP would go up.) It does not reflect distributional equity. (An expensive second home for a rich family makes the GNP go up more than an inexpensive basic home for a poor family.) It measures effort rather than achievement, gross production and consumption rather than efficiency. New light bulbs that give the same light with one-eighth the electricity and that last ten times as long make the GNP go down. GNP is a measure of throughput—flows of stuff made and purchased in a year—rather than capital stocks, the houses and cars and computers and stereos that are the source of real wealth and real pleasure.

Several types of inventory records are maintained in an effort to monitor food cost, determine purchase quantity, and identify inventory levels to maintain. Six of them are outlined in the following subsections: valuing inventory, the “ABC method,” fixed-item inventory, par stock system, “mini-max system,” and economic order quantity.

I’m going to use my good old suitcase metaphor one more time: A mutual fund is like a suitcase that holds dozens—and often hundreds—of individual stocks. If you like what is packed inside the suitcase, then you simply purchase shares of that mutual fund and, voilà, you are the proud owner of a small fraction of each one of the holdings in that suitcase. This gives you instant diversification, even though you bought just one mutual fund.

1. Investors give fund managers money at the wrong time. Now that you’ve had some time to read this book and understand the importance of buying stocks during fear cycles and holding during greed cycles, this first indicator should make sense. To understand this principle, imagine that you’re the fund manager of a $100 billion investment fund. When the stock market crashes and you’re able to purchase severely undervalued businesses with minimal debt, not only do you lack funds to invest, but all your resources are being depleted by scared investors. Instead of receiving money to buy the great deals, your investors are selling their shares in the fund and you don’t have the capacity to take advantage of the market behavior. This reason alone severely handicaps fund managers as they attempt to beat the market.

up the pathway to the front door.  She’d called and left him a message, letting him know that she was coming, and that she’d leave the documents with the housekeeper if he wasn’t there.  Ringing the doorbell, she couldn’t stop the blush that stole up her cheeks as she remembered the last time she’d been here.  Had it really been only two days ago?  It seemed like a lot longer.  Did he still have those stockings?  Surely he’d tossed them out by now.  And no, she hadn’t dared to purchase another pair.  Not after the last debacle.  When the door opened, she was bracing herself to face Hunter once again.  Her plan was to congratulate him, just as she would any other client, hand him the champagne and the closing documents, and then leave as quickly as possible.  Just as she would all of her other clients.  They were all trying to unpack, overwhelmed with the process but excited about their new purchase.  She very seriously doubted if anything overwhelmed Hunter, but she was going to go through her routine anyway.  All of her clients deserved the same treatment, and she shouldn’t slack off with Hunter simply because…well, because he could make her feel things that… “Goodness, come in out of the heat, my dear!” the housekeeper urged, waving Kara into the cool interior.  “Mr. West is out back in the pool, but he said he was expecting you and that you’d know the way.  If he needs anything at all,” she said, as she hefted a purse onto her shoulder that Kara suspected could substitute for a suitcase, “just tell him to give me a ring.” Kara opened her mouth to stop the woman as the two of them exchanged places, the housekeeper moving to the outside even as Kara was nudged inside.  Kara went so far as to lift her hand, trying to indicate that she wanted to say something, but the efficient woman bustled out of the house, closing the front door in the process.  Kara stared at the closed door for several long moments, wondering how that had just happened.  Her plan had been simple.  Just hand over the bottle and documents, convey her congratulations and head back.  What had just happened?  Kara turned around.  It felt strange to be standing here, alone, in Hunter’s house.  She’d been here two days ago, but the house hadn’t been his.  The man now owned the house, all the furniture, and the acres of land and waterfront.  It felt much more intimate now for some reason.  Looking around, she wished that she could just leave the documents on the kitchen counter or the rough, wooden coffee table that looked perfect next to the white sofas.  Everything felt and looked clean and comfortable, exactly as she would have decorated this area.  The pops of green were vibrant and exhilarating, a perfect accompaniment to the fresh, white furniture.  With a sigh, she turned away from the alluring great room décor and searched out the man of the moment.  As she stepped past the sofas, she saw him.  In the pool.  Without any clothes on! Oh goodness, she thought with a strangled breath.  It took her several moments to realize that she needed to inhale, her breath caught in her throat as she watched the man’s bare skin, and all the muscles, and…well, all of him!  Okay, so he wasn’t naked, he was wearing a bathing suit but his broad, muscular back and those arms…they were even more ridged with muscles than she’d thought.  He was spectacular!  Never in her wildest imaginings had she pictured him that buff, but there

The larger truth that I failed to see turned out to be another of those paradoxes—like the discounters’ principle of the less you charge, the more you’ll earn. And here it is: the more you share profits with your associates—whether it’s in salaries or incentives or bonuses or stock discounts—the more profit will accrue to the company. Why? Because the way management treats the associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the customers. And if the associates treat the customers well, the customers will return again and again, and that is where the real profit in this business lies, not in trying to drag strangers into your stores for one-time purchases based on splashy sales or expensive advertising. Satisfied, loyal, repeat customers are at the heart of Wal-Mart’s spectacular profit margins, and those customers are loyal to us because our associates treat them better than salespeople in other stores do. So, in the whole Wal-Mart scheme of things, the most important contact ever made is between the associate in the store and the customer. I

some items are difficult for the consumer to stock for very long. Depending on food habits, bread, milk, fruit, salad, vegetables, fish and meat may demand purchase several times a week, and so an out-of-stock can be hugely inconvenient and irritating.

she was a little on the loony side. She was a compulsive worrier, overprotective of her son to the nth degree, and should probably purchase stock in hand sanitizer companies for how often she used it.

Chapter 51 In Atlanta, the day had gone mostly as Elliott had expected. The stock market crash had rattled everyone. It was a cloud that hung over the euphoria of Black Friday. The most difficult part of his plan had been convincing the other five families to pool their money with his for the purchases, which together added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They had begun by renting two twenty-six-foot U-Haul trucks. They drove them to Costco and filled them with survival necessities. It was mostly food; Elliott planned to be near a freshwater source if worst came to worst. Next, they purchased two high-end RVs. The price was exorbitant, but they carried a thirty-day money-back guarantee, and they only had to make a down payment—the remainder was financed. Elliott had assured his neighbors that within thirty days, they would either be incredibly glad to have the two homes on wheels—or they’d have their money back. Now he sat in his study, watching the news, waiting for the event he believed would come. He hoped he was wrong. DAY 7 900,000,000 Infected 180,000 Dead

For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments.

The portfolios of overconfident investors will have higher risk for two reasons. First is the tendency to purchase higher-risk stocks. Higher-risk stocks are generally from smaller, newer companies. The second reason is a tendency to underdiversify their portfolios. Prevalent risk can be measured in several ways: portfolio volatility, beta, and the size of the firms in the portfolio. Portfolio volatility measures the degree of ups and downs the portfolio experiences. High-volatility portfolios exhibit dramatic swings in price and are indicative of underdiversification. Beta is a variable commonly used in the investment industry to measure the riskiness of a security. It measures the degree a portfolio changes with the stock market. A beta of 1 indicates that the portfolio closely follows the market. A higher beta indicates that the security has higher risk and will exhibit more volatility than the stock market in general.

On another occasion, he opined, "But, if ever forgetful of her past and present glory, she shall cease to be 'the land of the free and the home of the brave,' and become the purchased possession of a company of stock jobbers and speculators, if her people are to become the vassals of a great moneyed corporation, and to bow down to her pensioned and privileged nobility, if the patriots who shall dare to arraign her corruptions and denounce her usurpations, are to be sacrificed upon her gilded altar; such a country may furnish venal orators and presses but the soul of national poetry will be gone…That muse will 'Never bow the knee in mammon's fane.' No, the patriots of such a land must hide their shame in her deepest forests, and her bards must hang their harps upon the willows. Such a people, thus corrupted and degraded, 'Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying shall go down, To the vile dust from whence they sprung, Unwept, unhonored and unsung.

In a sense, each one of us was facing forces that were far bigger than us, forces that we barely understood. My own business was going down after supermarket chains started coming up in the town. They sold most packaged items below MRP and was drawing my customers away. At first I thought it was a gimmick to attract people. And that the prices will increase again after a couple of months. But it didn’t. After six months, I started realizing how big these people really are. People still bought in my store, but only in small quantities. They made all their bulk weekly purchases in the supermarket, walking around their big alleys, pushing around the carts as in the english movies. I accepted, with much pain and nostalgia for the olden days where stock used to move without effort, that things have probably changed forever. Most of us did.