Author: A.T.

Action in the Internet stocks is beginning to make investing a lot easier. Yesterday morning, for example, Amazon went up by another $2 billion in a couple of hours, to what would have been nearly “11 times Barnes & Noble” – the new “p/b” ratio as I have come to think of it, except that the truth is that B&N (symbol BKS) has also been rising, and so, with its profitable 504-store chain and its own unprofitable Internet site, Barnes & Noble now commands a value nearly one-seventh, not one-eleventh, as great as mighty Amazon.

One way of looking at all this is to think AMZN has gotten ahead of itself. (Was it more than a few weeks ago that an analyst made headlines predicting a target of 400 by the end of 1999? His only mistake was that word “end.” A keener mind would have targeted 400 for the “end of the first week” of 1999.) It reached its year-end, adjusted for splits, last night. (Well, 138 on the split stock, or 414 pre-split. But what’s an extra $725 million in market value? A mere rounding error!)

Wall Street now values Amazon more highly than FedEx, United Airlines and Barnes & Noble combined.

I am not one to quibble, and I am not going to say anything about Amazon’s losing more and more money. The market is telling us clearly that one day those mounting losses will turn to gushing profits and someday, conceivably, an actual cash money dividend. (Cash. You know, the stuff you might use to buy food or pay the rent.)

Rather, with Yahoo also up 30-odd points yesterday, and many others as well (I only pick on Amazon because it so mercilessly picks on me), I am here to draw the practical conclusions. To interpret the market’s message, as it were.

The first thing is: Forget all those beaten-down oil and oil-related stocks. The Internet will largely reduce the need to leave your home; far more fuel-efficient autos are just a few years off in any case; and global warming pretty well spells the end of the demand for heating oil.

Next, forget most of those high-yielding real estate investment trusts, especially the ones that invest in shopping centers. Yes, there will still be shopping centers, but on the margin, with competition from e-shopping about to boom, the tenants are going to get squeezed mercilessly, and thus, in the long run if not the short, squeeze many of the REITs.

And of course, forget the retailers themselves! I just placed a huge order with www.netgrocer.com. Netgrocer is hardly perfect yet – Arizona diet honey-flavored ginseng green tea is nowhere to be found, and they were out of the sliced carrots I ordered (don’t ask). But this nonetheless shifted $440 of business from the supermarket up the street onto a FedEx truck (I may have stupidly – insanely – shorted a few shares of AMZN a couple of months ago, but at least I’ve long owned a little FedEx) – and that can’t be good for the supermarket.

So, bang: Oil is history, retailing is history, commercial real estate is history. With the deflationary pressure that Internet competition and efficiency will bring (it’s efficient to cut out the middleman), say good-bye, also, to inflation, which means good-bye to gold and mining stocks. It also means low interest rates, which means there’s no point putting your money anyplace safe, like a bond or a bank, so you may as well join everyone else in putting it all into the market – Internet stocks being the ones that seem to go up the most – which is why I personally think that in 10 years, Amazon.com will have a $50 trillion valuation and own the entire world. (Two good acquisitions to start with: FedEx, to control the shipping process, and Disney/ABC, to be sure of some entertaining content on the site. It might also be useful to acquire IBM, to assure solid technology, and possibly Motorola or one of the others with an interest in a global satellite system.)

The interesting thing (to me, anyway) is that while I obviously think much of this is overdone or preposterous, it can’t all be dismissed out of hand. What’s more, when this impeachment uncertainty is finally over one way or another, even the stodgy old Dow, which managed barely a 233-point ho-hum gain yesterday could really begin to strut its stuff.

[My apologies. Yesterday I promised you free books. I’ve pushed that off to tomorrow.]

As I write this (Monday night), the stock market values AMZN at more than Federal Express and United Airlines combined. This could make sense, as I’ve argued several times before, if everything goes right and Amazon becomes one of a handful of companies that control all global e-commerce. Usually that kind of thing doesn’t happen, especially when competition is likely to be fierce. But it could.

I sort of hope it doesn’t, because I foolishly shorted a few shares of AMZN a couple of months ago. But it could.

I shorted it on November 16 at 128 — up from 25 earlier in the year. Thirty days later, I shorted a little more at 290. Not a bad 30-day run. Monday, it closed at 354 (and then split three for one, so now you have to divide all these numbers by three).

In the meantime, for book buying, I’ve begun switching to www.booksamillion.com. It charges about 20% less than Amazon, and when you buy as many books as I do, that mounts up.

Tomorrow: Free Books

Should you find yourself aswirl in a cloud of antimatter and flung, thus, back to the year 1968, I have an investment strategy that will turn $10,000 in a tax-free individual retirement account (if only there had been such things in 1968) into $5.7 million. The strategy is informally called (in a recent Barron’s, anyway) "the dogs of the Dow with bonds." It is based on Michael O’Higgins’ new book, Beating the Dow With Bonds: A High-Return, Low-Risk Strategy for Beating the Pros Even When Stocks Go South.

That same $10,000 invested in O’Higgins’ earlier dogs-of-the-Dow formulation without bonds — that is, simply investing each year in the five cheapest of the Dow’s 10 highest-dividend-yielding stocks — would have grown to but $1.4 million assuming no taxes.

And yet that is still a heck of a lot better than having just put $10,000 in the Dow itself and hung on. That theoretical exercise (theoretical because the 30 stocks that make up the Dow change a bit from time to time) would have produced a mere quarter million or so.

The new plan — with bonds — calls for you to be out of the market altogether when the yield from high-grade corporate bonds exceeds the implied "yield" from the S&P 500.

If the S&P is selling for 25 times earnings, then its implied yield (even though you only get a portion of it in actual cash, as dividends) is 4%. At 20 times earnings — 5%. At 10 times earnings — 10%. At 50 times earnings — 2%.

Lately … well, even since 1980, actually, this new system would have had you out of stocks and in bonds. That’s right: no stocks in your portfolio these last 18 years. And you would have done great, because what people forget about bonds is that in addition to paying interest, when the general level of interest rates falls, bond prices go up.

The added twist to O’Higgins’ new system has you choosing one of two polar-opposite kinds of bonds (in years like 1980-1998 when the system dictates bonds): one-year Treasuries when inflation is feared; long-term, zero-coupon Treasuries when it’s not. (To determine this, according to the O’Higgins system, you simply look at the price of gold. If its price is lower than a year ago, inflation is not in the cards. If gold is up from a year earlier, watch out.)

And by following this system, there in your 1968 blue jeans and radical sideburns, if you could have conned your parents out of $10,000 (and found a way to shelter the interest and capital gains from taxes), you’d have your $5.7 million today. You’d be — what was it we used to say in 1968? — made in the shade.

All with what the author suggests could be 15 or 20 minutes’ effort each year.

So now we know the second best way you could possibly have invested your money these last 30 years: this system. (The even better way, you will be sick by now of hearing, is to have put your money into the stock of Berkshire Hathaway and never, ever thought about it again.)

The question is: How about the next 30 years? Personally, because I rarely do find myself aswirl in a cloud of antimatter (or if I do, it resets my memory chip, so I don’t know it), this question is of more interest to me.

And for this I’m afraid the system may be nearly worthless — particularly for money you don’t have under the shelter of a tax-deferred account.

Yes, in many years the system might do fine, just as, looking back, the Dogs of the Dow did well. (Yet in the last couple of years, when the system became widely popular, the Dogs actually trailed the Dow — oh, no!)

But what if you had a year when the system dictated all your money should be out of the stock market and in long-term, zero-coupon Treasury bonds? Putting all your money in one thing is risky. And long-term zeroes are riskier still. They zoom when interest rates fall, but crash when interest rates rise.

So there you are, having sold all your stocks (and owing Uncle Sam and his local counterparts perhaps 30% of your profits) and having put the proceeds into zeroes, as per O’Higgins, because the price of gold is lower today than it was a year ago. And now, having spent your 15 minutes on this, you go on auto-pilot for a year. Fine. But what if, even though gold didn’t predict it, inflation fears should take hold mid-year? Down come your bonds, up goes gold … so come January you have to sell all the zeroes at a huge loss (only $3,000 of which serves to lower your taxable income, with excess losses carried over to future years) and buy one-year Treasuries (or else stocks, if they’ve finally gotten cheap enough).

So it was foolproof in hindsight (as any good system constructed with the benefit of hindsight is). But — going forward?

Basically, with this system you are betting you can time U.S. interest-rate movements by assuming that the price of gold will work as an inflation predictor in the future in the same way, and with the same timing, it has in the past.

And it may! In which case you’ll do very nicely.

Or it may not. In which case you won’t.

All that said, and taxes aside, the very broadest strokes of this idea are useful. We should be nervous about U.S. stocks at today’s levels. And there are times when a safe bet in one-year Treasuries will prove a lot more lucrative than something more exciting.

But beyond that, it doesn’t seem to me this system is the golden key after all.

Shucks!

(Note one other serious problem: With zero-coupon bonds owned outside a tax-sheltered account, you have to pay ordinary income tax each year on the imputed "interest" you earned — even though the actual amount of cash interest you got was: zero. So zeroes really make sense only within a tax-sheltered account.)

Ever wonder about all those amazing easy-riches strategies that come in the mail? You know it can’t be that easy … but, but ….

Well, I wonder about them. And I marvel at the skill of the copywriters who prepare them. And, well ….

So here was a message I got two years ago from one of you, Sandy Price:

"While you’re checking out stock market systems, check out the ‘Pitbull’ system advertised nearly every day in Investor’s Business Daily (great paper, by the way). Over 200% per year! He retired in his 40’s! Just thought you might get a chuckle."

Indeed, Sandy signed up. "It’s not making 200% per year this year for me," his message went on to say. "It does not appear to be for him either, based on the picks at the web site. But I am making money at it."

Hmmm. That was November 1996. So how has it turned out? Did Sandy earn 200% a year? Does retirement loom?

In his case, as it turns out, no.

"Commissions on that system were eating me alive so I abandoned it," he reports. "Don’t know how I would be doing now, but I was losing money too fast to continue with it."

(Sandy traded with Charles Schwab, the well-known discounter — but not a deep discounter. When you’re trading frequently — which I do not advise — even discount commissions can kill you. Say you made one trade a day. The difference between, say, $13 a trade and $50 comes to about $10,000 a year.)

Of the 33 positions Sandy traces on the Pitbull system, the net result appears to have been a loss of $3,663 on an investment of $83,026.

The point of this is not to attempt any kind of scientific debunking of the Pitbull method. I’ve actually forgotten what the method is (though I do remember being so taken by the sales literature that I, too, sent in my money, out of curiosity, but then never found time to read the material, let alone "try" it).

Rather, I just mean to suggest that in the real world, you are probably doing the right thing if you resist the temptation to open these remarkable direct-mail solicitations promising the can’t-lose newsletter or the money-back-guarantee seminar or the book-and-tapes-normally-an-$849-value-yours-for-just-$149.

Isn’t hindsight fun?

Tomorrow: The New Dogs of the Dow System

These are actual front-page headlines from the New York Times on Monday, January 1, 1900:

• SNEAK THIEVES GET $3,200. (In Chicago, no less.)

• BRITON TO BECOME AMERICAN. (Vice Consul at Kansas City to Be Naturalized There.)

• ERRORS IN THE HEMP FIGURES. (Someone must have been smoking it.)

• YOUNG WOMEN’S POLICE HERO. (They arrived in Brooklyn to visit a friend but had forgotten the address. A policeman gallantly made a bunch of calls and found it out for them.)

• FROZEN TO DEATH IN GEORGIA. “Stillman, GA — A young man, who gave his name as Will Morgan and his home as Warren County, was found frozen to death in a house used as a justice court room near here last night.” (It’s surprising, under the circumstances, he was up to giving his name and hometown.)

• DIED IN WISHING A HAPPY NEW YEAR: (Complete text: “Fishkill Plains — Mrs. David Todd of Poughkeepsie came here to-day to spend New Year’s with her daughter, Mrs. George W. Place. On entering her daughter’s house Mrs. Todd wished its inmates a Happy New Year and then fell dead upon the floor. She was the victim of heart disease.”)

• KENTUCKY MAYOR FROZEN UP. “Was Helping Fight a Fire, Was Rescued With Axes.” (So cold, a hose burst and covered him in ice; five men chopped him out.)

• FOUND DEAD IN SLEEPING CAR. (A Nova Scotia steamship executive died in his sleep on the train home from New York — four paragraphs on the front page of the New York Times.)

• QUITS THE CHICAGO ORCHESTRA. (The business manager of five years’ service quit for health reasons. Her polite letter of resignation was reprinted in full.)

It seems to me in reading these headlines that the world has become a harder, more complicated — if also even a more exciting and wonderful — place. And that it may be getting warmer.

So the whole deal about reading faster is to learn to read a whole line at a time, not word by word. The reading courses I used to take (they never helped) started me out with these little narrow width lines, and you were basically supposed to read DOWN, line after line. And then they’d give you wider lines.

So you know what just occurred to me? YOU HAVE A SUPER-DUPER READING-TRAINING MACHINE on your desk right now. Just click the edge of this window and move the edge
to narrow it
and my column
to look like
this. And then
once you’ve
got this width
pretty well
mastered —
moving your
eyes DOWN
the page — just
make it a little wider
and start reading at
this width until you
can go straight DOWN
the page this wide …
and then move the margin even
more to the right and spend a
week or two reading DOWN the
screen this way, and then, when you think
you really have it mastered, you can get
to newspaper-column width — and beyond.
Eventually — if the speed-reading crowd are right about this —
you’ll be reading wider and wider widths, moving your eye DOWN
the page instead of left to right, just as easily as, at first,
you read those itty-bitty baby widths. There are tens of thousands of
people who are living proof it works. I, meanwhile, am living proof
it does not work for everyone.
Wish it had.
Oh, well.
Nuts.

You may recall my comment on Delta Airlines’ background music. (It was driving me nuts.) I don’t want to jinx it, but I think they may actually have changed it, finally. Ah, the power of the e-press. But not before it occasioned this “old joke” (new to me) from Dana Dlott:

Q: Why is country-western music better than new age music?

A: When you play country-western music backwards, you get out of jail, you get back with your girlfriend, you get your job back, and your dog comes back to life. When you play new age music backwards, you just get more new age music.

#

Meanwhile, I have two movie suggestions for you to end the year on a high note. If you can find it, see LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, and don’t be put off by the subtitles. Yes, it’s in Italian, and yes, it’s got subtitles. But the subtitles are very big, and the movie – about which I want to tell you nothing, because that makes it even better – is brilliant, funny, original, incredibly sad and life affirming. The second should be easier to find: SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE. You will come away beaming and also wishing you had seen it before they assigned Shakespeare in high school. “Oh, now I get it.”

Three thumbs up.

So this friend of mine deals in estate sales. Somebody dies, a bank happens to be the trustee, it calls in several estate liquidators to bid on the estate, and my friend is often one of them. He comes in to the bank and looks at the stuff — the jewelry, for example — or goes out to the house and eyeballs the furniture and the car, and he makes a bid.

If he’s the high bid, he uses his wits to dispose of everything in a way that will net him more than he bid.

That’s the game. It’s the free market working pretty well. None of the liquidators bids so much that they can’t make a decent living. But there’s enough competition that the estate generally gets a reasonably good wholesale price for its goods. (If the bank were willing to do more work, and parcel everything out itself — to auction houses, primarily — it might eventually get the estate the extra money the liquidator earns. But it generally doesn’t work that way, and bank trust departments often don’t have the expertise and savvy these nimble fellows do.)

So in he goes to one of the banks that regularly calls him in to bid (sadly, rich people die on nearly as regular a basis as anyone else), and he bids on the jewelry, a field he knows well — but not on the diamonds. Diamonds he doesn’t know so well.

“Oh, come on,” says the bank trust person handling this, “bid on the diamonds.”

“Well, you know, I really don’t know diamonds that well. I’d rather not.”

“Listen, do me a favor. You don’t have to bid high, you won’t get them, but I need to show five bids … help me out.”

So my friend (who may not know diamonds that well, but who sure knows them a heck of a lot better than you or I) looks at the diamonds, still in their settings, looks at the appraisal — they are graded “G” by a Gemological Institute of America-certified appraiser — and he bids $70,000.

You already see where this is going. Yes, he got the diamonds. And when he went to sell them, and a jeweler took them out of their settings and really looked them over in ideal light (not a bank vault), he found that really they were not “G” grade after all, but a few steps lower — “J.”

I don’t know what this means any more than you do, except that it means trouble.

My friend went back to the bank, explained what had happened, and asked for his money back.

No, the bank said, they couldn’t do that. The money had already gone into the deceased’s trust account. It couldn’t come out. The sale was clearly marked “As Is.”

“Yes, sure,” said my friend, “but ‘As Is’ included an appraisal. You represented these stones were ‘G,’ and that’s the way I took them. I relied on your representation that they were ‘G.’”

Sorry, said the bank.

To my friend — to almost any of us, really — $70,000 is a lot of money, and while “J”-grade diamonds are not worthless, they are worth a heck of a lot less than “G”-grade stones — nearly 40%. This was a serious disaster.

He got the bank’s annual report and wrote a letter to each of its directors. (It is a very big bank.) A couple of weeks later, he got a call from someone in headquarters that the bank would reverse the transaction … assuming he gave back the same stones. They sent the appraiser who had done the appraisal to pick up the stones for the bank. The appraiser measured the stones and said, “These are not the same stones.”

My friend’s heart began to race. They were indeed the same stones, but this appraiser had an incentive to think they were not — especially because now, removed from their settings and viewed in good light, the appraiser could see they were definitely not “G.”

“Measure them again,” said my friend. “And again and again and again.”

The appraiser did and reluctantly agreed they were the same stones.

“How could you appraise them ‘G’ if they are ‘J’?” my friend asked. Well, said the appraiser, he hadn’t been able to take them out of their settings, and the light in the bank vault was lousy. “Well then,” asked my friend, “how come you didn’t at least append a footnote to your appraisal noting that?” Mumble, mumble.

My friend showed up at the bank for his check, and they handed him a check drawn on the trust account. No, said my friend. “Every other bank I deal with takes my personal check, but you always require a cashier’s check. So I want a cashier’s check from you.” (Well, he was angry.) So the bank drew him a cashier’s check, and he had his $70,000 back. (This bank has not invited him to bid on an estate sale since.)

Later, he ran into one of the other guys he frequently bids against on these sales. A more senior veteran of these wars. “How come I got the diamonds?” my friend asked. “How come you didn’t bid on them.”

The other estate liquidator said, “Well, I never rely on a GIA appraiser — only on a GIA appraisal.”

An appraiser is just one guy who belongs to the Gemological Institute of America giving his opinion. A GIA appraisal means the stones have been sent to New York, removed from their settings, observed under ideal conditions, and appraised by a committee of three expert GIA-certified appraisers.

Why do I tell you this story? Because I find this kind of thing fascinating. Not diamonds per se (to me, the only fascinating thing about diamonds is why anyone would buy them when synthetic diamonds look — and are — essentially identical), but just the drama of everyday commerce … how the world works. And because, also, it shows yet again that when it comes to investments, the fellow with the most expertise and information and experience has a big edge. If you’re not that person, you should think twice — especially when you’re buying something that lacks an easily ascertained market price.

PS — As I write this, I see in The Wall Street Journal a little ad for “Diamond Studs Priced Right.” Is this a good deal? I have no idea. (And aren’t buttons a lot easier anyway? Surely they are more economical.) But click www.e-diamonds.com if you want to take a look. “Inspect 10,000 fine diamonds with prices online.” They’ll even let you send anyone a “virtual diamond.”

PPS — My own instincts run more toward the financial instrument known as diamonds — stock symbol DIA — which more or less mimics the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

PPPS — Finally, should you be interested in the (lengthy and roundabout) details of how I obtained my own diamond from the Cheese of the Month Club once upon a time, it’s all in Chapter 13 of Money Angles, long out of print, but yours for the clicking.

There are a lot of things I could wish you for Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate). Indeed, I do wish you good health and peace, which I guess certainly top the list. But for the purposes of this column, I wish you two second-tier blessings: First, access to a speedy Internet connection of some kind — may your neighborhood get wired soon. Second, good luck.

Ah, luck.

I know I am supposed to be writing these columns myself, but quite often you send me messages that are much more interesting than what I had planned to write. So today’s column is by Stuart Altman, in Los Angeles. And luck is its topic. He writes:

"There is often an attitude — especially among the rich — that the rich deserve their wealth because they put one foot in front of the other, and if the lazy bums who didn’t had, they’d be rich, too. Which is certainly true some of the time. But luck seems to be the sine qua non a lot of the time, too. Especially in the world of movie stars (which certainly is a rarefied world, but nonetheless, I think they can be an example of luck changing lives).

"Critics often discuss movie stars who didn’t make their successes at 21 with an attitude of ‘Why did it take so long?’ As though these movie stars were an inevitable part of the cultural landscape, like volcanoes that were destined to erupt … and why didn’t they erupt sooner?

"One article in Esquire on Clint Eastwood said (more or less) ‘Eastwood was 33 when he had Fist Full [sic] Of Dollars as his first hit’ … as in, Why didn’t he have it when he was 23?

"Well, Eastwood had that hit by the SKIN OF HIS TEETH (and it’s that first hit that makes all the subsequent hits possible). Consider: Eastwood had a supporting part in the weekly TV western Rawhide. His agent said, ‘Want to do a western movie?’ He said, ‘I do a western every week for TV. I’m sick of westerns. No.’ He almost turned down Fist Full Of Dollars right then and there. But his agent said, ‘Just look at the script.’ He read the script, saw it was a rip-off of a Japanese movie he admired called Yojimbo, so decided to do it. So he flies to Italy to make the movie, and instant movie stardom follows, right? Not so fast.

"Sergio Leone, the director, thought that Fist Full Of Dollars was such a bad movie, he wanted to shelve it. He thought releasing it would ruin his reputation! But the Italian government helped finance the movie, and there was a law on the books that said that if the Italian government helped finance a movie, it had to be released in some capacity. So Leone reluctantly released the movie. He released it in Florence, far away from the Naples and Rome movie critics, who he was sure would butcher him if they saw it. He only planned to release it for a week, after which he planned to shelve it permanently. But the audience got bigger and bigger during the week, and it seemed only prudent to give it a wider release, that it got, making Eastwood a movie star. (But only a B movie star, really. And if Frank Sinatra had said yes to the lead in Dirty Harry, instead of no, Eastwood probably wouldn’t have been catapulted to legend status).

"The unknown Charles Grodin was cast in the part of Benjamin in The Graduate. He was on the set, and the cameras were all ready to roll. But he didn’t really hit it off with the director, Mike Nichols. So, out of pique … GRODIN ASKED FOR A RAISE. Grodin had been turned down for thousands of parts at this point, and here he FINALLY had a lead in a film with potential. But he asked for that raise. They told him no. He was warned, ‘Don’t blow your chance here.’ But he insisted on the raise. So they fired him — and hired the unknown Dustin Hoffman, who shortly after that was no longer unknown. Because The Graduate became at that point one of the few films to take in over $100 million. Making Dustin Hoffman a movie star … by a hair.

"Jack Nicholson had starred in some movies prior to Easy Rider. But they were the equivalent of what today would be straight-to-video junk. He was by no means a movie star. He was actually still debating whether to pursue writing, directing or acting, since nothing had clicked for him. Nicholson was asked for some advice by the producer of Easy Rider about some technical matters regarding the movie. Only then did the producer consider hiring Nicholson for the part of the boozy lawyer. So instant stardom followed? Not so fast.

"The producer called Dennis Hopper to his office and said, ‘Why don’t you hire Nicholson for the part of the lawyer?’

"Hopper said, ‘Absolutely not.’

"‘Look, Dennis, I’ve given you everything you’ve wanted on this movie. I’m just asking you this one favor. Hire Nicholson.’

"‘If I cast Nicholson, he will ruin my movie! Absolutely not!’

"‘Just do me this one favor. That’s all I ask.’

"‘Okay. I’ll hire Nicholson. But I’m telling you. You’ve ruined my movie.’

"Nicholson got hired. Easy Rider became a hit, and Nicholson became a star … barely.

"These stars all subsequently became filthy rich, have likely had dinner at the White House, and have had many other goodies lavished upon them.

"I don’t hate the rich. I’ve actually got a decent sized chunk of change myself. But when rich people act as though they earned their money, and they deserve it ONLY, and that luck had NOTHING to do with it … well, sometimes I bristle, and think of the above examples. (The Eastwood Fist Full Of Dollars story I got from an issue of ‘Premiere.’ The Hoffman Graduate story I got from Charles Grodin’s book It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here, and the Nicholson story I got from a Dennis Hopper interview on Bob Costas’ old 1:30 a.m. interview show.)"

Aren’t those fun stories? (This is me writing again.) I do think that somehow talents like Hoffman’s and Eastwood’s and Nicholson’s would have emerged sooner or later, but you never know. Anyway, just as I was about to click the SEND button, this postscript arrived:

"Wait! I forgot my favorite dumb-luck-movie-star story:

"Harrison Ford was a carpenter and had done a small part in George Lucas’s American Graffiti. But he was still a full-time carpenter who was about to leave town for good since he wasn’t amounting to anything in L.A. But he was called for a carpentry job at Francis Ford Coppola’s office. And so he went there and was working on the outside of the office when Lucas happened along. Lucas was borrowing Coppola’s office that day to audition actors for Star Wars. Lucas remembered Ford from Graffiti, and said, ‘Harrison, come in the office and help me audition these actors.’ He wasn’t even considering auditioning Ford himself. He just wanted Ford to read opposite the actors who were auditioning, after which Ford could go back to his carpentry.

"So Ford goes inside, helps these actors along. And Lucas likes how Ford read his lines. So he has him read for the part of Han Solo. And he got the part of Han Solo. A part in the biggest movie in history until Titanic.

"Now, L.A. is a big city. Think of all the addresses Ford could have been called to to do carpentry work. Even if he happened to be working on an office 30 feet away, Lucas might not have seen him, and there would go one of the biggest movie careers ever (Ford has acted in more top grossing movies than any other actor or actress). Or what if Coppola had needed his office that day, and Lucas couldn’t borrow it? Lucky.

"And even after Star Wars, Ford wasn’t a star. (Han Solo was a supporting part.) It took Indiana Jones to make him a star. And Tom Selleck was cast as Indiana Jones. But CBS wouldn’t let him out of his contract for the new series Magnum P.I. Speilberg and Lucas pleaded with CBS for them to let Selleck play Indiana Jones. But CBS wouldn’t allow it. So, because of this CBS brick wall, they had to cast Harrison Ford instead. Lucky. Luck ain’t all it takes. But it is part of what it takes."

Thanks, Stuart. I think you’re right. Luck — and, in the movie business, great teeth.

Here’s wishing you all a very merry Christmas and lots of luck in the New Year. (Don’t forget to floss.)