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* Today’s defensive investor should probably insist on at least 10 years of continuous dividend payments (which would eliminate from consideration only one member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average—Microsoft—and would still leave at least 317 stocks to choose from among the S & P 500 index). Even insisting on 20 years of uninterrupted dividend payments would not be overly restrictive; according to Morgan Stanley, 255 companies in the S & P 500 met that standard as of year-end 2002.

† The “Rule of 72” is a handy mental tool. To estimate the length of time an amount of money takes to double, simply divide its assumed growth rate into 72. At 6%, for instance, money will double in 12 years (72 divided by 6 = 12). At the 7.1% rate cited by Graham, a growth stock will double its earnings in just over 10 years (72/7.1 = 10.1 years).

* Graham makes this point on p. 73.

† To show that Graham’s observations are perennially true, we can substitute Microsoft for IBM and Cisco for Texas Instruments. Thirty years apart, the results are uncannily similar: Microsoft’s stock dropped 55.7% from 2000 through 2002, while Cisco’s stock—which had risen roughly 50-fold over the previous six years—lost 76% of its value from 2000 through 2002. As with Texas Instruments, the drop in Cisco’s stock price was sharper than the fall in its earnings, which dropped just 39.2% (comparing the three-year average for 1997–1999 against 2000–2002). As always, the hotter they are, the harder they fall.

* “Earnings multiplier” is a synonym for P/E or price/earnings ratios, which measure how much investors are willing to pay for a stock compared to the profitability of the underlying business. (See footnote † on p. 70 in Chapter 3.)

† Investors can now set up their own automated system to monitor the quality of their holdings by using interactive “portfolio trackers” at such websites as www.quicken.com, moneycentral.msn.com, finance.yahoo.com, and www.morningstar.com. Graham would, however, warn against relying exclusively on such a system; you must use your own judgment to supplement the software.

* To update Graham’s figures, take each dollar amount in this section and multiply it by five.

* In today’s markets, to be considered large, a company should have a total stock value (or “market capitalization”) of at least $10 billion. According to the online stock screener at http://screen.yahoo.com/stocks.html, that gave you roughly 300 stocks to choose from as of early 2003.

1 Peter Lynch with John Rothchild, One Up on Wall Street (Penguin, 1989), p. 23.

2 Kevin Landis interview on CNN In the Money, November 5, 1999, 11A. M. eastern standard time. If Landis’s own record is any indication, focusing on “the things that you know” is not “all you really need to do” to pick stocks successfully. From the end of 1999 through the end of 2002, Landis’s fund (full of technology companies that he claimed to know “firsthand” from his base in Silicon Valley) lost 73.2% of its value, an even worse pounding than the average technology fund suffered over that period.

3 Sarah Lichtenstein and Baruch Fischhoff, “Do Those Who Know More Also Know More about How Much They Know?” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, vol. 20, no. 2, December, 1977, pp. 159–183.

4 See Gur Huberman, “Familiarity Breeds Investment”; Joshua D. Coval and Tobias J. Moskowitz, “The Geography of Investment”; and Gur Huberman and Paul Sengmuller, “Company Stock in 401(k) Plans,” all available at http://papers.ssrn.com.

5 According to finance professor Charles Jones of Columbia Business School, the cost of a small, one-way trade (either a buy or a sell) in a New York Stock Exchange–listed stock dropped from about 1.25% in Graham’s day to about 0.25% in 2000. For institutions like mutual funds, those costs are actually higher. (See Charles M. Jones, “A Century of Stock Market Liquidity and Trading Costs,” at http://papers.ssrn.com.)

6 To help determine whether the stocks you own are sufficiently diversified across different industrial sectors, you can use the free “Instant X-Ray