Beating the Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

can’t illustrate with a crayon.
    This rule ought to be adopted by many adult money managers, amateur and professional, who have a habit of ignoring the understandably profitable enterprise in favor of the inexplicable venture that loses money. Surely it would have kept investors away from Dense-Pac Microsystems, a manufacturer of “memory modules,” the stock of which, alas, has fallen from $16 to 25 cents. Who could draw a picture of a Dense-Pac Microsystem?
    In order to congratulate the entire St. Agnes fund department (which doubles as Ms. Morrissey’s social studies class) and also to learn the secrets of its success, I invited the group to lunch at Fidelity’s executive dining room, where, for the first time, pizza was served. There, Ms. Morrissey, who has taught at St. Agnes for 25 years, explained how her class is divided every year into teams of four students each, and how each team is funded with a theoretical $250,000 and then competes to see who can make the most of it.
    Each of the various teams, which have adopted nicknames such as Rags to Riches, the Wizards of Wall Street, Wall Street Women, The Money Machine, Stocks R Us, and even the Lynch Mob, also picks a favorite stock to be included in the scrapbook, which is how the model portfolio is created.
    The students learn to read the financial newspaper Investor’s Business Daily. They come up with a list of potentially attractive companies and then research each one, checking the earnings and the relative strength. Then they sit down and review the data and decide which stocks to choose. This is a similar procedure to the one that is followed by many Wall Street fund managers, although they aren’t necessarily as adept at it as the kids.
    â€œI try to stress the idea that a portfolio should have at least ten companies, with one or two providing a fairly good dividend,” says Ms. Morrissey. “But before my students can put any stock in the portfolio, they have to explain exactly what the company does. If they can’t tell the class the service it provides or the products itmakes, then they aren’t allowed to buy. Buying what you know about is one of our themes.” Buying what you know about is a very sophisticated strategy that many professionals have neglected to put into practice.
    One of the companies the students at St. Agnes knew about was Pentech International, a maker of colored pens and markers. Their favorite Pentech product, with a marker on one end and a highlighter on the other, was introduced into the class by Ms. Morrissey. This pen was very popular, and some of the kids even used it to highlight their stock selections. It wasn’t long before they were investigating Pentech itself.
    The stock was selling for $5 at the time, and the students discovered that the company had no long-term debt. They were also impressed by the fact that Pentech made a superior product, which, judging by its popularity in house, was likely to be just as popular in classrooms nationwide. Another positive, from their point of view, was that Pentech was a relatively unknown company, as compared, say, to Gillette, the maker of Paper Mate pens and the Good News razors they saw in their fathers’ bathrooms.
    Trying to come to the aid of a colleague, the St. Agnes fund managers sent me a Pentech pen and suggested I look into this wonderful company. This advice I wish I had taken. After I received the research tip and neglected to act on it, the stock nearly doubled, from 5⅛ to a high of 9½.
    This same kid’s-eye approach to stockpicking led the 1990 St. Agnes fund managers to the Walt Disney Company, two sneaker manufacturers (Nike and L. A. Gear), the Gap (where most of them buy their clothes), PepsiCo (which they know four different ways via Pepsi-Cola, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Frito-Lay), and Topps (a maker of baseball cards). “We were very much into trading cards within the seventh