Year-End Wishes for the Winners and Sinners of ’93
Season’s Greetings, and here’s hoping all of your ’93 returns were happy ones. If not, in another week it’ll be 1994, and you can try your luck all over again.
In keeping with the spirit of the season, we extend Christmas and New Year’s wishes to some special investors and others who made news in ‘93:
* For the horde of new buyers of foreign stock mutual funds, especially funds of so-called emerging markets that most people couldn’t find on a map if they tried: We wish you a bottle of Maalox and a big dose of intestinal fortitude--because you’re going to need them. Tiny markets that go up 90% in one year can lose 90% the next. If you can’t live with that possibility, this isn’t your game, no matter what the broker told you.
* For Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin, the stock of whose asset-rich multimedia giant now is 9.3%-owned by the “friendly” Bronfman family of Seagram Co. fame: a private screening of “Barbarians at the Gate,” in case he missed it the first time on his HBO cable channel.
* For Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone and WMS Industries CEO Louis Nicastro, whose purchases of each other’s stocks in the fall pumped up both shares’ prices at amazingly opportune times for the companies--though both claim no knowledge of the other’s dealings (the SEC is investigating): a clear conscience--or, failing that, good lawyers.
* For Ross Perot, who in his NAFTA debate with Vice President Al Gore succeeded in insulting the entire Mexican nation with his stereotyped depiction of the country: a conscience, period.
* For investors who paid $48 a share in the fall frenzy for multimedia black-box developer 3DO Co., which has since plunged to $20: a copy of “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay, which in 1841 documented past (and apparently, all future) speculative financial bubbles.
* For Dreyfus Corp. CEO Howard Stein, who is trying to persuade Wall Street that the mutual fund titan’s proposed merger with Mellon Bank makes strategic sense, and won’t wind up another ill-fated attempt at creating a “financial supermarket”: 47 synonyms for the word synergies.
* For new Eastman Kodak Co. CEO George Fisher, who left Motorola to take over one of the most paternalistic and entrenched major companies in America: a desk paperweight inscribed with the date Jan. 13, 1973, and the price $68 a share--a reminder that, adjusted for splits, Kodak stock is trading below its 1970s peak, 20 years later.
* For all stockbrokers who push their company’s in-house mutual funds and other products just because they earn a higher commission on them--even when the customer would clearly be better off in a non-proprietary product that pays the broker slightly less: photos of their mothers for their desks. (Nothing else seems to shame them into stopping.)
* For executives of Boston Chicken, the fast-food chain whose shares made their debut at $20 each in November, then promptly rocketed to $51: Minnie Pearl’s Chicken Memorial Wishbone. (Minnie’s went public in 1968 amid much hoopla; she hung up her deep fryer for good not many years later.)
* For the 56% of small investors who, in a recent survey, answered in the affirmative when asked if mutual funds sold by banks were insured, either by the bank or the government: a free, fast cab ride back to the bank.
* For novice utility-stock investors, who have seen an average 11% carved off their “conservative” stocks just since Aug. 31: a (shared) cab ride back to the bank.
* For American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall, whose arrogance toward his employees helped spark a strike by flight attendants during Thanksgiving week, ruining travel plans for thousands of American’s customers: the Dale Carnegie home-study course.
* Finally, for Robert Prechter, the Gainesville, Ga.-based market forecaster who has been calling for a crash--incorrectly--for six years, and who now is citing superhigh women’s hemlines on Paris fashion runways as a sure sign stocks are peaking (the market is supposed to follow hemlines): a guest spot on supermodel Cindy Crawford’s “House of Style” show on MTV. (He can’t do much damage there; when he says “crash,” most viewers will think he’s talking about a party.)
