Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Notable and Quotable from Better Lucky Than Good

I just finished Better Lucky Than Good, a book on general investing theory. This book is more for the beginner than it is for the advanced investor. In fact, it is probably the perfect gift for an investment adviser to give to a new client. But it didn't satisfy me. I was tricked by the sub-title: "How savvy investors create fortune with the risk-reward ratio". That sounded to me like a technical exposition on balancing risk and reward, which is what drew me in. I was disappointed to say the least.
But I wanted to share a few of my favorite quotes, because on some level the book was helpful. You may find some of the basic accounting quotations not particularly relevant, but I wanted to denote them for my future reference. It's always good to brush up on things you don't use everyday, particularly when it comes to accounting.
  • The cornerstones of a good investment philosophy: a strong business model, good financials, an attractive valuation, and diversification.
  • Fear of being left behind is a powerful force and has caused many investors to make irrational decisions.
  • Paying attention to trends in analysts' comments or changes in them can help you make better investment decisions.
  • In looking at earnings estimates, analyst the trend over the last 60 days. Look for a clear trend of rising estimates (good) or falling estimates (bad) and pay attention to the actual [relative] size of the changes.
  • If you can learn to control your emotions, make rational decisions, and be willing to part with an investment, you will increase your overall returns.
  • Business and investing conditions change, so should your portfolio.
  • #1 Rule of Investing: Only do what allows you to sleep at night.
  • Use earnings estimate revisions as a signal to do more research.
  • If intangibles account for a significant portion of total assets, then shareholders equity could be overstated.
  • Beware if gross margins are narrow, especially if they are 10% or less. Such small gross margins suggest the company lacks pricing power.
  • A sharp increase or decrease in working capital should be examines. It could be an early sign the company is experiencing problems.
  • If a stock has a yield similar to bonds, shareholders are not being reimbursed for the additional level of risk.

Friday, May 13, 2011

Why Hedge Fund Managers Quit

In 2008 and 2009 there were a number of stories about money managers closing down their funds only to open a new one a short time later. Why would someone do that? Because they have the incentive to do so. Incentives matter. 

Knowing this intuitively, I wanted to help convey that incentive visually so I created the graph below. As you can see, as the losses begin the percentages required to get back to even (in financial pjargon it is referred to as the highwater mark) get higher and higher. Notice the logarithmic scale on the left axis.

Percentages don't speak to everyone so I added a time dimension by creating the right axis. If you assume  that the person could earn 20% (a very good return and well over the major indices' averages) constantly (an even bigger assumption than the return because of the volatile nature of stocks) until they earn back all of the loss then for a given % loss on the x-axis you can see how many months it would take to wait for the recovery on the y-axis. As the chart indicates, if a hedge fund manager loses 15% of his (your)  assets, without considering another gyration in the market it would take a manager a full year to reach the highwater mark. A 36% drop, which is similar to what investors witnessed for the full 2008 calendar year, would take three full years to recover. The highwater mark is particularly important in the hedge fund world, because they often have a rule in their contacts which requires them to get back to the highwater mark in order to earn the management fee (usually 2% of assets which is substantial for large funds).



So, facing no possibility of fees in the near future and with the possibility of things taken another downward turn the manager has the incentive to take a rational (not the most moral) step - close down the current fund that is below the highwater mark and create a new fund where he can start getting paid immediately.


Thursday, May 12, 2011

Best Passages from Peter Lynch's Beating the Street: Part 3

OK, let's wrap this up:
  • I don't think of [shopping] as browsing. I think of it as a fundamental analysis on the intriguing lineup of potential investments, arranged side by side for the convenience of stock shoppers.
  • The very homogeneity of taste in food and fashion that makes for a dull culture also makes fortunes for owners of retail companies and of restaurant companies as well. What sells in one town is almost guaranteed to sell in another.
  • You want to avoid the retailers that expand too fast, especially if they're doing it on borrowed money.
  • As a rule of thumb, a stock should sell at or below its growth rate.
  • Digging where the surroundings are tranquil and pleasurable may prove to be as unrewarding as doing detective work from a stuffed chair. You've got to go into places where other investors and especially fund managers fear to tread, or, more to the point, to invest.
  • Reading a prospectus is like reading the fine print on the back of an airline ticket. Most of it is boring, except for the exciting parts that make you never want to get on an airplane or buy a single share of stock again.
  • Whenever book value comes up, I ask myself the same question we all ask about the movies: is this based on a true story or is it fictional?
  • In a highly leveraged company, bank debt is dangerous, because if the company runs into problems the bank will ask for its money back.
  • I'm always on the lookout for great companies in lousy industries. A great industry that's growing fast, such as computers or medical technology, attracts too much attention and too many competitors. When an industry gets too popular, nobody makes money there anymore.
  • In a lousy industry, one that's growing slowly if at all, the weak drop out and the survivors get a bigger share of the market.
  • Peter's principle #16: In business, competition is never as healthy as total domination.
  • The greatest companies in the lousy industries share certain characteristics. They are low-cost operators, and penny-pinchers in the executive suite. They avoid going into debt. They reject the corporate caste system that creates white-collar Brahmins and blue-collar untouchables. Their workers are well paid and have a stake in the companies' future. They find niches, parts of the market that bigger companies have overlooked. They grow fast--faster than many companies in the fashionable fast-growth industries.
  • Peter's principle #17: All else being equal, invest in the company with the fewest color photographs in the annual report.
  • Peter's principle #18: When even the analysts are bored, it's time to start buying.
  • I never hang up on a source without asking: what other companies do you most admire?
  • This is the way you look at a long-shot S&L: find out what the equity is and compare that to the commercial loans outstanding. Assume the worst.
  • Buying on the bad news can be a very costly strategy, especially since bad news has a habit of getting worse.
  • Buying on the good news is healthier in the long run, and you improve your odds considerably by waiting for the proof.
  • This is a very useful year-end review for any stockpicker: go over your portfolio company by company and try to find a reason that the next year will be better than the last. If you can't find such a reason, the next question is: why do I own the stock?
  • Owners can always give you a reason their horses will win, and they are wrong 90 percent of the time.
  • A high p/e ratio, which with most stocks its regarded as a bad thing, may be good news for a cyclical. Often, it means that a company is passing through the worst of the doldrums, and soon its business will improve, the earnings will exceed the analysts' expectations, and fund managers will start buying the stock in earnest.
  • It's perilous to invest in a cyclical without having a working knowledge of the industry and its rhythms.
  • The most important question to ask about a cyclical is whether the company's balance sheet is strong enough to survive the next downturn.
  • One useful indicator for when to buy auto stocks is used-car prices. When used-car dealers lower their prices, it means they're having trouble selling cars, and a lousy market for them is even lousier for the new-car dealers.
  • In the stock market it rarely pays to take yesterday's news too seriously, or to hold an opinion too long.
  • Peter's principle #20: Corporations, like people, change their names for one of two reasons: they've gotten married, or they've been involved in some fiasco that they hope the public will forget.
  • A simple way to make a nice living from troubled utilities: buy them when the dividend is omitted and hold on to them until the dividend is restored.
  • There are always respected investors who say that you're wrong. You have to know the story better than they do, and have faith in what you know.
  • For a stock to do better than expected, the company has to be widely underestimated. Otherwise, it would sell for a higher price to begin with. When the prevailing opinion is more negative than yours, you have to constantly check and recheck the facts, to reassure yourself that you're not being foolishly optimistic.
  • Here's the key question to ask about a risky yet promising stock: if things go right, how much can I earn?
  • There are different shades of buys. There's the "what else am I going to buy?" buy. There's the "maybe this will work out" buy. There's the "buy now and sell later" buy. There's the "buy for your mother-in-law" buy. There's the "buy for your mother-in-law and all the aunts, uncles, and cousins" buy. There's the "sell the house and put the money into this" buy. There's the "sell the house, the boat, the cars, and the barbecue and put the money into this" buy. There's the "sell the house, boat, cars, and barbecue , and insist your mother-in-law, aunts, uncles, and cousins do the same" buy.
  • During periods when mutual funds are popular, investing in the companies that sell the funds is likely to be more rewarding than investing in their products.
  • A healthy portfolio requires a regular checkup.
  • Rejecting a stock because the price has doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled in the recent past can be a big mistake. Whether a million investors have made or lost money on Chrysler last month has no bearing on what will happen next month. I try to treat each portential investment as if it had no history--the "be here now" approach. Whatever occured earlier is irrelevant. The important thing is whether the stock is cheap or expensive today at $21-$22, based on its earnings potential of $5 to $7 a share.
  • You can beat the market by ignoring the herd.
  • Behind every stock is a company. Find out what it's doing.
  • YOu have to know what you own and why you own it.
  • Long shots almost always miss the mark.
  • Everyone has the brainpower to make money in stocks. Not everyone has the stomach.

Best Passages from Peter Lynch's Beating the Street: Part 2

I haven't had much time to go through Peter Lynch's Beating the Street since I last posted, but today I have some free time and would like to get these notes down for yours and my own reference.
  • This is one of the keys to successful investing: focus on the companies, not on the stocks.
  • My methods were not much different from an investigative reporter - reading the public documents for clues, talking with intermediaries such as analysts and investor relations people for more clues, and then going directly to the primary sources: the companies themselves.
  • Every stockpicker could benefit from keeping a notebook of [stock] stories. Without one, it's easy to forget why you bought something in the first place.
  • If you're prepared to invest in a company then you ought to be able to explain why in simple language that a fifth grader could understand, and quickly enough so the fifth grader won't get bored.
  • A computer company can lose half its value overnight when a rival unveils a better product, but a chain of donut franchises in New England is not going to lose business when somebody opens a superior donut franchise in Ohio.
  • When you have to concern yourself with what the person behind you thinks about your work, it seems to me that you cease to be a professional. You are no longer responsible for what you do. This creates a doubt in your mind as to whether you are capable of succeeding at what you do--otherwise, why would they be monitoring your every move?
  • Peter's Principle #8: When yields on long-term government bonds exceed the dividend yield of the S&P 500 by 6 percent or more, sell your stocks and buy bonds.
  • Why investors attempt to prepare for total disaster by bailing out of their best investments is beyond me. If total disaster strikes, cash in the bank will be just as useless as a stock certificate. On the other hand, if total disaster does not strike (a more likely outcome, given the record) the "cautious" types become the reckless ones, selling their valuable assets for a pittance.
  • No matter how well you think you understand a business, something can always happen that will surprise you.
  • Bargains are the holy grail of the true stockpicker. The fact that 10-30 percent of our net worth is lost in a market sell-off is of little consequence. We see the latest correction not as a disaster but as an opportunity to acquire more shares at low prices. This is how great fortunes are made over time.
  • [Sarcastically talking about a bad call on IBM] you aren't really a fund manager unless you have Big Blue in the portfolio.
  • How much time you spend on researching stocks is directly proportional to how many stocks you own.
  • In stocks as in romance, ease of divorce is not a sound basis for commitment. If you've chosen wisely to begin with, you won't want a divorce. And if you haven't you're in a mess no matter what. All the liquidity in the world isn't going to save you from pain, suffering, and probably a loss of money.
  • Peter's principle #11: The best stock to buy may be the one you already own.
  • Peter's principle #12: A sure cure for taking a stock for granted is a big drop in the price.
  • When your best-case scenario turns out to look worse than everybody else's worst-case scenario, you have to worry that the stock is floating on a fantasy.
  • Tbere's no shame in losing money on a stock. Everybody does it. What is shameful is to hold on to a stock, or, worse, to buy more of it, when the fundamentals are deteriorating.
  • Peter's principle #13: Never bet on a comeback while they're playing "Taps".
  • Here's a tip from experience: before you invest in a low-priced stock in a shaky company, look at what's been happening to the price of the bonds.
  • Cyclicals are like blackjack: stay in the game too long and it's bound to take back all your profit.
  • Stockpicking is both an art and a science, but too much of either is a dangerour thing. A person infatuated with measurement, who has his head stuck in the sand of the balance sheets, is not likely to succeed. If you could tell the future from a balance sheet, then mathematicians and accountants would be the richest people in the world by now.
  • A pile of software isn't worth a damn if you haven't done your basic homework on the companies.
  • I've learned to think of investments not as disconnected events, but as continuing sagas, which need to be rechecked from time to time for new twists and turns in the plots. Unless a company goes bankrupt, the story is never over. A stock you might have owned 10 years ago, or 2 years ago, may be worth buying again.

Monday, May 9, 2011

Is it possible to be scared of a book?

Ordinarily I would say no. But as I grabbed The Intelligent Investor off the shelf this weekend for the first time since I bought it in 2008, I realized it is. This book has been called the greatest investment book of all time by Warren Buffett! It was written by the father of value investing, Ben Graham. For an analogy,

Sun Tzu : War :: Ben Graham : Investing.

Suffice it to say, I was intimidated. Enough to put off reading the book for over three years. If I read the book and then didn't live up to the legends who internalized this tome and went on to rack up the best records in the business, then I'd be a failure. If I could just delay reading it then I could delay the day I would have to look critically at my own performance. People love scapegoats, and not reading The Intelligent Investor became mine. But yesterday something changed. I realized I am not succeeding according to Coach Wooden's definition of success:

“Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.”

I know that I will never realize my potential as an investor without this knowledge. So I grabbed it off the shelf and began. I'm ready now. I'm no longer afraid.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

April Reading List


by Peter Lynch, John Rothchild
Recommended
Comment: "This book is pretty good. It has great and practical advice for both the novice and the advanced stockpicker. The only downside is that the stock picks are dated now. For instance, he recommended Allied Capital which has since gone bankrupt and is the subject of David Einhorn's book which I finished last month. But just because the recommendations are not valid anymore doesn't mean you can't learn from Lynch's thought process and reasoning. I found these passages invaluable."
 
by Paul A. Samuelson, William A. Barnett 
Comment: "I hardly ever do this and I hate to say it, but I quit this book before I finished it. It is a little more technical and less accessible than other books on economists that I've read, e.g. "Lives of the Laureates" and "The Worldly Philosophers". I also found it to be repetitive because a considerable amount of the interviews were with people I've already heard describe their background in depth. "
 
by Isaac Asimov
Recommended
Comment: "This book was fantastic. I couldn't put it down.
The Foundation trilogy, of which this is not a part but it is in the line of books, won a special Hugo award for best science fiction series ever. This is the first book in that line, so I started at the beginning. I can't wait to read the rest.
"
 
by Frank Brady
Recommended
Comment: "This book was fantastic. Frank Brady knows more about Bobby Fischer than any other living person.
I loved following Bobby's fanatic/obsessive preparation and rise in the chess world and then hated what the pursuit of the world's #1 position did to him as he descended into a sad character on the fringe of society. This book was not exactly an apology for Fischer, but it did have those qualities. For example, Brady gave a number of reasons why Fischer may have become anti-Semitic, one being to strike back at the US Chess Federation.
Reading this book got me so excited about chess that I am going to start learning the game. I think it will give me skills on thinking strategically.
This book is definitely worth your time.
"
 
by Alex Berenson, Mark Cuban
Recommended
Comment: "What a fantastic read. Alex Berenson is a captivating writer who masterfully wove together many different narratives - accounting, government regulatory, and stock market history as well as the stories of corporate misdoings by Computer Associates, Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom. "

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings (Wiley Investment Classics)by Philip A. Fisher, Ken Fisher
Comment: "My expectations for this book were high. I was severely disappointed. The best part of this book is that it's over. The worst part of this book is that Phillip's son Kenneth owns the rights to the book. He took that privilege and ran with it. Kenneth, a billionaire investor, droned on for a dozen pages of prologue before writing another 27 for the introduction. If you happen to pick up this copy, and I suggest that you don't, skip all of Kenneth's writing. It's horrible.
Phillip writes like I hope that I don't: overly verbose with too complicated a structure. His writing also has too many references to previous statements so quoting him is impossible. In my view, the best investment writers drop little nuggets of wisdom. Because of the way Fisher writes, you won't get much of that from this book. The other problem with the writing is that there are too many examples so the book doesn't stand up historically. I don't want to read about Dow Chemical in the '50s or Motorola in the '70s. Both of these stocks are also written about because Fisher owned them which I found highly annoying.
I did find bits and pieces that I believe was adopted by other investment managers, e.g. three year rule, buying something when it is priced well and not haggling over 1/8ths.
However, I recommend that you skip this book.
"

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Best Passages from Peter Lynch's Beating the Street: Part 1

I just finished Peter Lynch's Beating the Street. While the stock picks are dated and not useful anymore, the insights into Lynch's stock thought process were invaluable. I'd like to share some of them with you by recording some of the passages I underlined:
  • [On retirement] there comes a point at which you have to decide wheter to become a slave to your net worth by devoting the rest of your life to increasing it or let what you've accumulated begin to serve you.
  • Unfortunately, buying stocks on ignorance is still a popular American pastime...When people discover they are no good at baseball or hockey, they put away their bats and their skates and they take up amateur golf or stamp collecting or gardening. But when people discover they are no good at picking stocks, they are likely to continue to do it anyway.
  • The stock market is the one place where the high achiever is routinely shown up.
  • A retired fund manager is qualified to give only investment advice, not spiritual advice.
  • Peter's Principle #3: Never invest in any idea you can't illustrate with a crayon.
  • IBM is an approved stock that everybody knows and a fund manager can't get into trouble for losing money on.
  • The key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.
  • In dieting and in stocks, it is the gut and not the head that determines the results.
  • A successful investor does not let weekend worrying dictate his or her strategy.
  • Peter's Principle #4: You can't see the future through a rearview mirror.
  • [Successful investors] somehow manage to develop a disciplined approach to investing that enables us to block out our own distress signals.
  • If you don't buy stocks with the discipline of adding so much money a month to your holdings, you've got to find some other way to keep the faith.
  • Whenever I am confronted with doubts and despair about the current Big Picture, I try to concentrate on the Even Bigger Picture.
  • The Even Bigger Picture tells us that over the last 70 years, stocks have provided their owners with gains of 11 percent a year, on average, whereas Treasury bills, bonds, and CDs have returned less than half that amounts.
  • A successful stockpicker has the same relationship with a drop in the market as a Minnesotan has with freezing weather. You know it's coming, and you're ready to ride it out, and when your favorite stocks go down with the rest, you jump at the chance to buy more.
  • Whereas companies routinely reward their shareholders with higher dividends, no company in the history of finance, going back as far as the Medicis, has rewarded its bondholders by raising the interest rate on a bond. Bondholders aren't invited to annual meetings to see the slide shows, eat hors d'oeuvres, and get their questions answered, and they don't get bonuses when the issuers of the bonds have a good year. The most a bondholder can expect to get is his or her principal back, after its value has been shrunk by inflation.
  • People who sleep better at night because they own bonds and not stocks are susceptible to rude awakenings.
  • Here's a good strategy for convertible investing: buy into convertible funds when the spread between convertible and corporate bonds is narrow (say, 2 percent or less) and cut back when that spread widens.
  • Fund managers and athletes have this in common: they may do better in the long run if they're brough along slowly.
  • Peter's Principle #7: The extravagance of any corporate office is directly proportional to management's reluctance to reward the shareholders.
  • Flexibility is the key. There are always undervalued companies to be found somewhere.
  • I always ended these discussions [with company's management or investor relations] by asking: which of your competitors do you respect the most?
  • Small [caps] is not only beautiful, it also can be lucrative.
I think that's long enough for one post.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Haiku - You deserve some time off

I used to love work,
Ran hard after the carrot.
Where has my life gone?
-JDW


Thursday, April 14, 2011

Bobby Fischer is a badass

Two of my favorite quotes so far in the book "Endgame", a biography of Bobby Fischer:
"But why would Geller expect Fischer to take a quick draw? Fischer's entire record as a player shows his abhorrence of quick draws and his wish at every reasonable (and sometimes unreasonable) occassion to play until there is absolutely no chance of winning. No draws in under 40 moves is an essential part of his philosophy."
and
"Taking nothing for grandted was one of the key's to Fischer's success."
 The whole book is worth a read and is easily accessible for the chess outsider like me. I love reading biographies. The more you read the more you realize there is a pattern of success: hard work bordering on obsession. For instance, it was estimated that between his ninth and eleventh birthdays Bobby played a thousand games a year. Between his eleventh and fourteenth birthdays he played 12,000 games a year. Another example: in 1970, Fischer left NYC to go to the Catskill mountains to prepare for the World Championship match against Spassky. In the four months that he trained there he spent 12 hours a day 7 days a week reading, thinking, and preparing for one match.

I'll have more on this book after I finish it.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Notable and Quotable from Alex Berenson's "The Number"

I just finished The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America. What a fantastic read. Alex Berenson is a captivating writer who masterfully wove together many different narratives - accounting, government regulatory, and stock market history as well as the stories of corporate misdoings by Computer Associates, Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom. It was a great read.

As I've written before, I like to underline as I go along. Here are some of my favorite passages, which will give you an idea of how good a writer Berenson is. All of the points are attributable to him unless otherwise specified.
  • "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
  • On Wall Street, not all numbers are created equal.
  • Earnings per share is the ultimate benchmark of a company's success or failure.
  • Earnings per share is the number for which all the other numbers are sacrificed. It is the distilled truth of a company's health. Earnings per share is the number that counts.
  • But the trouble with bubbles...the trouble with bubbles is they don't last.
  • Accountants are the plumbers of capitalism, unappreciated but vital to the system.
  • Bear markets have villains. Bull markets have heroes.
  • A conglomerateur who runs out of acquisitions is a very unhappy conglomerateur. He's stuck managing the companies he has already bought, which are all too often third-rate companies in slow-growth industries. Winners buy; losers manage. Worse, the skills that make a successful conglomerateur-salesmanship, impatience with details, and a huge ego-are more or less the opposite of the skills needed to successfully manage a company.
  • Diversification is no protection against loss if that diversification consists of owning a diverse group of second-rate stocks.
  • If Wall Street's history proves anything, it is that investors of all sizes examine financial statements much less closely when stocks are rising.
  • In Wall Street's version of heaven, the strip clubs don't have covers and every month is January. In hell, on the other hand, the calendar always reads October.
  • "You start as an analyst, but you end as an ambassador."
  • Bill Barnhart of the Chicago Tribune: "When you boil down the entirety of a corporate enterprise to a few pennies, the chances for error, misunderstanding and mischief are immense."
  • [Stock] options are worth something even when they're not worth anything. They are as close as Wall Street comes to believing in an afterlife.
  • Roger Lowenstein on executive compensation, specifically the abuse of stock options: "By turns, a system designed to motivate became one to simply enrich."
  • The clash between longs and shorts is about more than money; it is the eternal battle of hope and realism.
  • Short-sellers are the little voice in the middle of the night, the voice a CEO cannot allow himself to hear: Your numbers are crap. Your new product is way behind schedule. You're booking sales for which you'll never get paid. You're burning cash. The competition is ruinous. You don't have a chance. That $200 million you raised last year, it's gone. What now? To executives, that voice is death, so the shorts are killers.
  • During the worst panics, the market does not make even a halfhearted attempt to rally. It closes at the day's lows, and one has the sense that if not for the 4 P.M. bell, prices would fall until the Dow and the S&P 500 and every stock in them all hit zero, and even then traders would try to sell short. The very concept of a bottom is laughable. Only a night's rest can bring sanity back to the world...But the worst crashes do not last just one day.
  • After the first day of a crash, no one can know where it will end. It is a force of nature as much as any hurricane or earthquake.
  • Michael Lewis on the 1990s: "A boom without crooks is like a dog without fleas...A healthy free-market economy must tempt a certain number of people to behave corruptly."
  • It's time for all of us, investors and executive and managers and employees, to admit what we already know: Just because a company hits its earnings targets doesn't mean it is flourishing; just because it misses for a quarter or two doesn't mean that it is failing. Just because a company has grown 15 percent a year for a couple of years in a row doesn't mean it can grow 15 percent a year forever. Only a handful of companies has earnings that can be smoothly plotted more than a few months in advance. Business doesn't work that way. Life doesn't work that way. [Emphasis my own] Planes run late; meetings go badly; contracts don't get signed when they're supposed to. Hire good people is hard; making good acquisitions is harder. Even well-run companies have a tough time keeping decent financial controls, figuring out where to invest research dollars, and satisfying investors and the media. And not ever investment pays off in three months. Sometimes smaller profits now can mean a better business and bigger profits later.
  • The number is a lie. We need it; we can't avoid it. But it's still a lie.
Hush thee, my babe, Granny's bought some new shares,
Daddy's gone out to play with the bulls and the bears,
Mommy's buying on tips, and she simply can't lose,
And baby shall have some expensive new shoes!
-September 1929 in the Saturday Evening Post