Sunday, August 19, 2007

List of villians in the investment community

1) The conglomerate movement, “with all its fancy rhetoric about synergism and leverage.”

2) Accountants who played footsie with stock-promoting managements by certifying earnings that weren’t earnings at all.

3) “Modern” corporate treasurers who looked upon their company pension funds as new-found profit centers and pressured their investment advisers into speculating with them.

4) Investment advisers who massacred clients’ portfolios because they were trying to make good on the over-promises that they had made to attract the business.


5) Investment managers who brought and churned the worst collection of new issues and other junk, and the underwriters who made fortunes bringing them out.

6) Elements of the financial press which promoted into new investment geniuses a group of neophytes who didn’t even have the first requisite for managing their own money, much less other people’s money, and a lack for sense of responsibility.

7) The securities salesmen who peddle the items with the best stories – or the biggest markups – even though such issues were totally unsuited to the customers’ needs.


8) The sanctimonious partners of major investment houses who wrung their hands over all these shameless happenings while they deployed an army of untrained salesmen to forage even less trained investors.

9) Mutual fund managers who tried to become millionaires overnight by using every gimmick imaginable to manufacture their own paper performance.


10) Portfolio managers who collected bonanza incentives of the “heads I win, tails you lose” kind, which made them fortunes in the bull market but turned the portfolios they managed into disasters in the bear market.

11) Security analysts who forgot about their professional ethics to become storytellers and let their institutions be taken in by a whole parade of confidence men.

4 comments:

Jay said...

Haha, this is an interesting list. Almost everyone in the financial industry becomes a villian. Which is actually true in some sense.

Very intriguing posts lately, any good books to introduce?

Berkshire said...

1) Fortune Formula
2) The smartest guys in the room
3) Den of Thieves
4) Barbarians at the Gate
5) Supermoney
6) Common sense on Mutual funds
7) Seeking wisdom: From Darwin to Munger
8) Sam Walton Made in America
9) Bull

Depending on what you'd like to read.

Jay said...

Thanks a lot! I am still reading some of those classics, recently finished Random Walk Down Wall Street, I must it's a good read even though it's first published more than 20 yrs ago.

QUALITY STOCKS UNDER FIVE DOLLARS said...

That was the best post I have heard in a long time.