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The fact is that the user of our method would have had a much wider choice. If our winnowing approach had been applied to all 4,500 companies in the Stock Guide, and if the ratio for the first tenth had held good throughout, we would end up with about 150 companies meeting all six of our criteria of selection. The enterprising investor would then be able to follow his judgment—or his partialities and prejudices—in making a third selection of, say, one out of five in this ample list.

The 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.

TABLE 15-1 A Sample Portfolio of Low-Multiplier Industrial

Single Criteria for Choosing Common Stocks

An inquiring reader might well ask whether the choice of a better than average portfolio could be made a simpler affair than we have just outlined. Could a single plausible criterion be used to good advantage—such as a low price/earnings ratio, or a high dividend return, or a large asset value? The two methods of this sort that we have found to give quite consistently good results in the longer past have been (a) the purchase of low-multiplier stocks of important companies (such as the DJIA list), and (b) the choice of a diversified group of stocks selling under their net-current-asset value (or working-capital value). We have already pointed out that the low-multiplier criterion applied to the DJIA at the end of 1968 worked out badly when the results are measured to mid-1971. The record of common-stock purchases made at a price below their working-capital value has no such bad mark against it; the drawback here has been the drying up of such opportunities during most of the past decade.

What about other bases of choice? In writing this book we have made a series of “experiments,” each based on a single, fairly obvious criterion. The data used would be readily found in the Standard & Poor’s Stock Guide. In all cases a 30-stock portfolio was assumed to have been acquired at the 1968 closing prices and then revalued at June 30, 1971. The separate criteria applied were the following, as applied to otherwise random choices: (1) A low multiplier of recent earnings (not confined to DJIA issues). (2) A high dividend return. (3) A very long dividend record. (4) A very large enterprise, as measured by number of outstanding shares. (5) A strong financial position. (6) A low price in dollars per share. (7) A low price in relation to the previous high price. (8) A high quality-ranking by Standard & Poor’s.

It will be noted that the Stock Guide has at least one column relating to each of the above criteria. This indicates the publisher’s belief that each is of importance in analyzing and choosing common stocks. (As we pointed out above, we should like to see another figure added: the net-asset-value per share.)

The most important fact that emerges from our various tests relates to the performance of stocks bought at random. We have tested this performance for three 30-stock portfolios, each made up of issues found on the first line of the December 31, 1968, Stock Guide and also found in the issue for August 31, 1971. Between these two dates the S & P composite was practically unchanged, and the DJIA lost about 5%. But our 90 randomly chosen issues