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6 Just 12 months later, Juno’s shares had shriveled to $1.093.

7 A ticker symbol is an abbreviation, usually one to four letters long, of a company’s name used as shorthand to identify a stock for trading purposes.

8 This was not an isolated incident; on at least three other occasions in the late 1990s, day traders sent the wrong stock soaring when they mistook its ticker symbol for that of a newly minted Internet company.

9 In 2000 and 2001, Amazon.com and Qualcomm lost a cumulative total of 85.8% and 71.3% of their value, respectively.

10 Schwert discusses these findings in a brilliant research paper, “Anomalies and Market Efficiency,” available at http://schwert.ssb.rochester.edu/papers.htm.

11 See Plexus Group Commentary 54, “The Official Icebergs of Transaction Costs,” January, 1998, at www.plexusgroup.com/fs_research.html.

12 James O’Shaughnessy, What Works on Wall Street (McGraw-Hill, 1996), pp. xvi, 273–295.

13 In a remarkable irony, the surviving two O’Shaughnessy funds (now known as the Hennessy funds) began performing quite well just as O’Shaughnessy announced that he was turning over the management to another company. The funds’ shareholders were furious. In a chat room at www.morningstar.com, one fumed: “I guess ‘long term’ for O’S is 3 years…. I feel your pain. I, too, had faith in O’S’s method…. I had told severalfriends and relatives about this fund, and now am glad they didn’t act on my advice.”

14 See Jason Zweig, “False Profits,” Money, August, 1999, pp. 55–57. A thorough discussion of The Foolish Four can also be found at www.investor home.com/fool.htm.

* The list of sources for investment advice remains as “miscellaneous” as it was when Graham wrote. A survey of investors conducted in late 2002 for the Securities Industry Association, a Wall Street trade group, found that 17% of investors depended most heavily for investment advice on a spouse or friend; 2% on a banker; 16% on a broker; 10% on financial periodicals; and 24% on a financial planner. The only difference from Graham’s day is that 8% of investors now rely heavily on the Internet and 3% on financial television. (See www.sia.com.)

* The character of investment counseling firms and trust banks has not changed, but today they generally do not offer their services to investors with less than $1 million in financial assets; in some cases, $5 million or more is required. Today thousands of independent financial-planning firms perform very similar functions, although (as analyst Robert Veres puts it) the mutual fund has replaced blue-chip stocks as the investment of choice and diversification has replaced “quality” as the standard of safety.

* Overall, Graham was as tough and cynical an observer as Wall Street has ever seen. In this rare case, however, he was not nearly cynical enough. Wall Street may have higher ethical standards than some businesses (smuggling, prostitution, Congressional lobbying, and journalism come to mind) but the investment world nevertheless has enough liars, cheaters, and thieves to keep Satan’s check-in clerks frantically busy for decades to come.

† The thousands of people who bought stocks in the late 1990s in the belief that Wall Street analysts were providing unbiased and valuable advice have learned, in a painful way, how right Graham is on this point.

† ‡ Interestingly, this stinging criticism, which in his day Graham was directing at full-service brokers, ended up applying to discount Internet brokers in the late 1990s. These firms spent millions of dollars on flashy advertising that goaded their customers into trading more and trading faster. Most of those customers ended up picking their own pockets, instead of paying someone else to do it for them—and the cheap commissions on that kind of transaction are a poor consolation for the result. More traditional brokerage firms, meanwhile, began emphasizing financial planning and “integrated asset management,” instead of compensating their