Beating the Street Read Online Free Page A

describe in the second half of this book were constantly changing in the course of my research. For example, Pier 1 was selling for $7.50 when I began looking into it and $8 when I finally recommended it in Barron’s. On one page, I may refer to Pier 1 as a $7.50 stock, and on another as an $8 stock. Several such anomalies may appear in the text.)

ONE
THE MIRACLE OF ST. AGNES
    Amateur stockpicking is a dying art, like pie-baking, which is losing out to the packaged goods. A vast army of mutual-fund managers is paid handsomely to do for portfolios what Sara Lee did for cakes. I’m sorry this is happening. It bothered me when I was a fund manager, and it bothers me even more now that I have joined the ranks of the nonprofessionals, investing in my spare time.
    This decline of the amateur accelerated during the great bull market of the 1980s, after which fewer individuals owned stocks than at the beginning. I have tried to determine why this happened. One reason is that the financial press made us Wall Street types into celebrities, a notoriety that was largely undeserved. Stock stars were treated like rock stars, giving the amateur investor the false impression that he or she couldn’t possibly hope to compete against so many geniuses with M.B.A. degrees, all wearing Burberry raincoats and armed with Quotrons.
    Rather than fight these Burberried geniuses, large numbers of average investors decided to join them by putting their serious money into mutual funds. The fact that up to 75 percent of these mutual funds failed to perform even as well as the stock market averages proves that genius isn’t foolproof.
    But the main reason for the decline of the amateur stockpicker has to be losses. It’s human nature to keep doing something as long as it’s pleasurable and you can succeed at it, which is why the worldpopulation continues to increase at a rapid rate. Likewise, people continue to collect baseball cards, antique furniture, old fishing lures, coins, and stamps, and they haven’t stopped fixing up houses and reselling them, because all these activities can be profitable as well as enjoyable. So if they’ve gotten out of stocks, it’s because they’re tired of losing money.
    It’s usually the wealthier and more successful members of society who have money to put into stocks in the first place, and this group is used to getting A’s in school and pats on the back at work. The stock market is the one place where the high achiever is routinely shown up. It’s easy to get an F here. If you buy futures and options and attempt to time the market, it’s easy to get all F’s, which must be what’s happened to a lot of people who have fled to the mutual funds.
    This doesn’t mean they stop buying stocks altogether. Somewhere down the road they get a tip from Uncle Harry, or they overhear a conversation on a bus, or they read something in a magazine and decide to take a flier on a dubious prospect, with their “play” money. This split between serious money invested in the funds and play money for individual stocks is a recent phenomenon, which encourages the stockpicker’s caprice. He or she can make these frivolous side bets in a separate account with a discount broker, which the spouse doesn’t have to know about.
    As stockpicking disappears as a serious hobby, the techniques of how to evaluate a company, the earnings, the growth rate, etc., are being forgotten right along with the old family recipes. With fewer retail clients interested in such information, brokerage houses are less inclined to volunteer it. Analysts are too busy talking to the institutions to worry about educating the masses.
    Meanwhile, the brokerage-house computers are busily collecting a wealth of useful information about companies that can be regurgitated in almost any form for any customer who asks. A year or so ago, Fidelity’s director of research, Rick Spillane,