The Intelligent Investor_ The Definitive Book on Value Investing - Benjamin Graham [277]
7 For more on the rationale for keeping a portion of your portfolio in foreign stocks, see pp. 186–187.
8 Source: spreadsheet data provided courtesy of Ibbotson Associates. Although it was not possible for retail investors to buy the entire S & P 500 index until 1976, the example nevertheless proves the power of buying more when stock prices go down.
* Here Graham has made a slip of the tongue. After insisting in Chapter 1 that the definition of an “enterprising” investor depends not on the amount of risk you seek, but the amount of work you are willing to put in, Graham falls back on the conventional notion that enterprising investors are more “aggressive.” The rest of the chapter, however, makes clear that Graham stands by his original definition. (The great British economist John Maynard Keynes appears to have been the first to use the term “enterprise” as a synonym for analytical investment.)
* “High-coupon issues” are corporate bonds paying above-average interest rates (in today’s markets, at least 8%) or preferred stocks paying large dividend yields (10% or more). If a company must pay high rates of interest in order to borrow money, that is a fundamental signal that it is risky. For more on high-yield or “junk” bonds, see pp. 145–147.
† As of early 2003, the equivalent yields are roughly 5.1% on high-grade corporate bonds and 4.7% on 20-year tax-free municipal bonds. To update these yields, see www.bondsonline.com/asp/news/composites/html or www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates.html and www.bloomberg.com/markets/ psamuni.html.
* For a recent example that painfully reinforces Graham’s point, see p. 146 below.
* Bond prices are quoted in percentages of “par value,” or 100. A bond priced at “85” is selling at 85% of its principal value; a bond originally offered for $10,000, but now selling at 85, will cost $8,500. When bonds sell below 100, they are called “discount” bonds; above 100, they become “premium” bonds.
* New issues of common stock—initial public offerings or IPOs—normally are sold with an “underwriting discount” (a built-in commission) of 7%. By contrast, the buyer’s commission on older shares of common stock typically ranges below 4%. Whenever Wall Street makes roughly twice as much for selling something new as it does for selling something old, the new will get the harder sell.
† Recently, finance professors Owen Lamont of the University of Chicago and Paul Schultz of the University of Notre Dame have shown that corporations choose to offer new shares to the public when the stock market is near a peak. For technical discussion of these issues, see Lamont’s “Evaluating Value Weighting: Corporate Events and Market Timing” and Schultz’s “Pseudo Market Timing and the Long-Run Performance of IPOs” at http:// papers.ssrn.com.
* In the two years from June 1960, through May 1962, more than 850 companies sold their stock to the public for the first time—an average of more than one per day. In late 1967 the IPO market heated up again; in 1969 an astonishing 781 new stocks were born. That oversupply helped create the bear markets of 1969 and 1973–1974. In 1974 the IPO market was so dead that only nine new stocks were created all year; 1975 saw only 14 stocks born. That undersupply, in turn, helped feed the bull market of the 1980s, whenroughly 4,000 new stocks flooded the market—helping to trigger the over-enthusiasm that led to the 1987 crash. Then the cycle swung the other way again as IPOs dried up in 1988–1990. That shortage contributed to the bull market of the 1990s—and, right on cue, Wall Street got back into the business of creating new stocks, cranking out nearly 5,000 IPOs. Then, after the bubble burst in 2000, only 88 IPOs were issued in 2001—the lowest annual total since 1979. In every case, the public has gotten burned on IPOs, has stayed away for at least two years, but has always returned for another scalding. For as long as stock markets have existed, investors