tailieunhanh - The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book On Value part 26

The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book On Value part 26. The purpose of this book is to supply, in a form suitable for laymen, guidance in the adoption and execution of an investment policy. Comparatively little will be said here about the technique of analyzing securities; attention will be paid chiefly to investment principles and investors’ attitudes. We shall, however, provide a number of condensed comparisons of specific securities - chiefly in pairs appearing side by side in the New York Stock Exchange list in order to bring home in concrete fashion the important elements involved in specific choices of common stocks | 236 The Intelligent Investor We have presented this picture in order to point a moral which perhaps can best be expressed by the old French proverb Plus ça change plus c est la même chose. Bright energetic people usually quite young have promised to perform miracles with other people s money since time immemorial. They have usually been able to do it for a while or at least to appear to have done it and they have inevitably brought losses to their public in the end. About a half century ago the miracles were often accompanied by flagrant manipulation misleading corporate reporting outrageous capitalization structures and other semifraudulent financial practices. All this brought on an elaborate system of financial controls by the SEC as well as a cautious attitude toward common stocks on the part of the general public. The operations of the new money managers in 1965-1969 came a little more than one full generation after the shenanigans of The specific malpractices banned after the 1929 crash were no longer resorted to they involved the risk of jail sentences. But in many corners of Wall Street they were replaced by newer gadgets and gimmicks that produced very similar results in the end. Outright manipulation of prices disappeared but there were many other methods of drawing the gullible public s attention to the profit possibilities in hot issues. Blocks of letter stock 3 could be bought well below the quoted market price subject to undisclosed restrictions on their sale they could immediately be carried in the reports at their full market value showing a lovely and illusory profit. And so on. It is As only the latest proof that the more things change the more they stay the same consider that Ryan Jacob a 29-year-old boy wonder launched the Jacob Internet Fund at year-end 1999 after producing a 216 return at his previous dot-com fund. Investors poured nearly 300 million into Jacob s fund in the first few weeks of 2000. It then proceeded to lose .