Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings

 
Origins of a Philosophy 
2 3 1 

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they sold, but rather in that day of a seller’s market they gratefully
accepted any part of a syndicate offered them by their New York asso- 
ciates or by the large investment banking houses. Then the security
salesmen for the bank would portray to their customers that they had a
statistical department capable of surveying those customers’ holdings
and issuing to them a report on each security handled. What was actu- 
ally done in those “security analyses” was to look up the data on a par- 
ticular company in one of the established manuals of the day, such as 
Moody’s or Standard Statistics. Then someone like myself, with no further 
knowledge than what was reported in that manual, would simply para-
phrase the wording of the manual to write his own report. Any company
that was doing a large volume of sales was invariably reported as “well 
managed,” just because it was big. I was under no direct orders to rec- 
ommend that customers switch some of the securities I “analyzed” into 
whatever security the bank was attempting to sell at the moment, but 
the whole atmosphere was one of encouraging this type of analysis. 
BUILDING THE BASICS 
It was not very long before the superficiality of the whole procedure 
caused me to feel that there must be a better way to do this. I was 
extremely fortunate in having an immediate boss who completely
understood why I was concerned and granted me the time to make an 
experiment which I proposed to him. At that time, in the fall of 1928, 
there was a great deal of speculative interest in radio stocks. I introduced
myself as a representative of the investment arm of the bank to the
buyers of the radio department of several retail establishments in San 
Francisco. I asked them their opinions of the three major competitors 
in this industry. I was given surprisingly similar opinions from each of 
them. In particular, I learned a great deal from one man who was him-
self an engineer and who had worked for one of these companies. One 
company, Philco, which from my standpoint unfortunately was private- 
ly owned so that it represented no stock market opportunity, had devel- 
oped models which had especial market appeal. As a result, they were 
getting market share at a beautiful profit to themselves because they 
were highly efficient manufacturers. RCA was just about holding its 
own market share, whereas another company, which was a stock market 
favorite of the day, was slipping drastically and showing signs of getting