Snippets to remember
Jun 21st, 2006 by chandrashekar
“Take a nice a little company that’s been making shoelaces for 40 years and sells at a respectable six times earning ratio. Change the name from Shoelaces, Inc. to Electronics and Silicon Furth-Burners. In today’s market, the words “electronics” and “silicon” are worth 15 times earnings. However, the real play comes from the word “furth-burners”, which no one understands. A word that no one understands entitles you to double your entire score. Therefore, we have six times earnings for the shoelace business and 15 times earnings for electronic and silicon, or a total of 21 times earnings. Multiply this by two for furth-burners and we now have a score of 42 times earnings for the new company.”
Jack Dreyfus (as quoted in A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton G. Malkiel) on the boom time name-game
“WARNING: THIS COMPANY HAS NO ASSETS OR EARNINGS AND WILL BE UNABLE TO PAY DIVIDENDS IN THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE. THE SHARES ARE HIGHLY RISKY.”
This is what people ignored while investing in overvalued electronics firms in 1961, Burton G. Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street
“In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there’s this other possibility we have to consider against it. So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table.
I am suprised and disturbed that Compton doesn’t repeat and emphasize his point. Finally, at the end, Tolman, who’s the chairman, would say, “Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it’s true that Compton’s argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead.”
It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end the decision is made as to which idea was the best-summing it all up-without having to say it three times.
These were very great men indeed”
-Richard Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”
“One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it’s only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.”
-Paul Graham, “What You’ll Wish You’d Known”
“I would be riding my bicycle, and some lady would be driving in her car get in the way, and I’d say, “PUzzia a la maLOche!“-and she’d shrink! Some terrible Italian boy had cursed a terrible curse at her!
It was not so easy to recognize it as fake Italian”
-Richard Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”