Author: A.T.

And this just in from someone with a cryptic AOL address. Today being the first day of Chanukah, I thought it might bring a smile to faces Jewish and gentile alike. In these politically-correct times, I feel I should preface it by saying I am a trustee of the Shoah Foundation, and it didn’t offend me. So I trust no one else — including aviary-rights advocates — will be offended either. It’s a joke:

Meyer, a lonely widower, was walking home one night when he passed a pet store (perhaps a PetSmart — PETM?) and heard a squawking voice shouting out in Yiddish, “Quawwwwk … vus machst du … yeah, du … outside, standing like a schlemiel … eh?”

Meyer rubbed his eyes and ears. He couldn’t believe it. The proprietor sprang out of the door and grabbed Meyer by the sleeve. “Come in here, fella, and check out this parrot.”

Meyer stood in front of an African Grey that cocked his little head and said, “Vus? Ir kent reddin Yiddish?”

Meyer turned excitedly to the store owner. “He speaks Yiddish?”

In a matter of moments, Meyer had placed five hundred dollars down on the counter and carried the parrot in his cage away with him. All night he talked with the parrot in Yiddish. He told the parrot about his father’s adventures coming to America, about how beautiful his mother was when she was a young bride, about his family, about his years of working in the garment center, about Florida. The parrot listened and commented. They shared some walnuts. The parrot told him of living in the pet store, how he hated the weekends. Finally, they both went to sleep.

Next morning, Meyer began to put on his tefillin, all the while saying his prayers. The parrot demanded to know what he was doing, and when Meyer explained, the parrot wanted to do it too. Meyer went out and handmade a miniature set of tefillin for the parrot. The parrot wanted to learn to daven, so Meyer taught him how read Hebrew, and taught him every prayer in the Siddur with the appropriate nussach for the daily services. Meyer spent weeks and months sitting and teaching the parrot the Torah, Mishnah and Gemara. In time, Meyer came to love and count on the parrot as a friend and a Jew.

On the morning of Rosh Hashanah, Meyer rose, got dressed and was about to leave when the parrot demanded to go with him. Meyer explained that Shul was not a place for a bird, but the parrot made a terrific argument and was carried to Shul on Meyer’s shoulder. Needless to say, they made quite a sight when they arrived at the Shul, and Meyer was questioned by everyone, including the Rabbi and Cantor, who refused to allow a bird into the building on the High Holy Days. However, Meyer convinced them to let him in this one time, swearing that the parrot could daven.

Wagers were made with Meyer. Thousands of dollars were bet (even money) that the parrot could NOT daven, could not speak Yiddish or Hebrew, etc. All eyes were on the African Grey during services. The parrot perched on Meyer’s shoulder as one prayer and song passed – Meyer heard not a peep from the bird. He began to become annoyed, slapping at his shoulder and mumbling under his breath, “Daven!”

Nothing.

“Daven … feigelleh, please! You can daven, so daven … come on, everybody’s looking at you!”

Nothing.

After Rosh Hashanah services were concluded, Meyer found that he owed his Shul buddies and the Rabbi over four thousand dollars. He marched home quite upset, saying nothing. Finally several blocks from the Shul, the bird, happy as a lark, began to sing an old Yiddish song. Meyer stopped and looked at him.

“You miserable bird, you cost me over four thousand dollars. Why? After I made your tefillin, taught you the morning prayers, and taught you to read Hebrew and the Torah. And after you begged me to bring you to Shul on Rosh Hashanah, why? Why did you do this to me?”

“Don’t be a schlemiel,” the parrot replied. “You know what odds we’ll get at Yom Kippur?!”

If you like that joke and are Jewish, like me, you may retell it. If you are not Jewish, maybe not. But my main concern is that whoever wrote it has gotten no credit for it. In hope of finding some attribution, I used the Alta Vista engine to search on “Meyer” and “Parrot” — and it turns out (seriously!) there’s a guy named Meyer who has a parrot, but not a Jewish parrot. When I added Rosh Hashanah into the search mix, I came up blank. Thanks, in any event, to whoever started this thing orbiting. I assume he’s Jewish.

"Is money the root of all evil?" — Dawn M.

Hardly. Shaw had it right. Lack of money is the root of all evil. Once people get a lot of it, they turn into philanthropists, endow colleges, and send their sons off to be inspiring presidents of the United States.

Money itself — the medium of exchange — is of course this miraculous invention that is as fundamental to economics and prosperity as language is to civilization and culture.

It’s not money that causes evil, it’s desire (whether material or sexual or egomaniacal). Not to knock desire; just to say that a "good" person will not allow it to trample basic notions of fairness and honesty. So it’s perhaps the lack of scruples or conscience that’s the root of all evil. A chemical imbalance, no doubt. One day there will be a pill. Or a patch. (Imagine the money in that!) And the truly evil people will find a way to get everybody else to take it, or wear it, but not them. AND THEY WILL TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Except that George Clooney and Nicole Kidman will find those people in the nick of time — I mean WITH JUST SECONDS TO SPARE — and stick patches on them and it will all work out OK.

Trust me on this.

From Siu: "I have seen a couple of cases so far this year that were related to my question. I will use the most recent one as an example. OmniHealth is being acquired by some company announced on 10/17/97 for $35/share cash. Why is Omni’s price still around $31? This puzzles me."

A: It’s because some people must fear the deal might fall through, in which case the stock could fall back to where it was. Incidentally, I think you may mean OmniCare, not OmniHealth. Last I checked, no one was offering to buy it for $35.

Greg in California: I’m new to investing but I understand that the firm of Salomon Bros has been in the bond business for a long time? and provides services to a lot of institutional clients? Their newest funds for individual investors are relatively new so it’s hard to track them for any length of time. My question is: Is Salomon Bros the gurus of the bond world? do they have a reputation I’m not aware of? Their bond funds are sure expensive. Thanks.

A: The only thing Salomon may be more expert in than bonds is making money for themselves. No harm in that, but I would advise going with very inexpensive funds (or, when it comes to U.S. Treasury bonds, the program known as Treasury Direct — call 800-943-6864 at any time of day or night, listen to the end of the recording, and then enter your zip code when prompted to get a local phone number to call during business hours for details).

From Kiruba: "I am an engineering student working on a graduate degree. I don’t know much about investing in the stock market but am thinking about investing some money in it. I have some (very dumb??) questions and wonder if you can help me with them.

1) When I buy and sell shares, do I pay tax only on the profit I make?

A: You pay ordinary income tax on any dividends the shares may pay you. You pay capital gains tax on any profits you realize when you sell. (The profit is figured after deducting brokerage commissions.) If you hold the shares a year or less, the capital gains rate is no different from your ordinary income rate. Lower rates kick in at the one-year-and-a-day mark (i.e., if you bought April 3, 1997, you must wait until April 4, 1998 to sell), the 18-month-and-a-day mark, and, beginning for most people with shares purchased after 2000, the 5-year-and-a-day mark. Note that losses offset gains — you only pay taxes each year on your net gains. And should you have net losses — up to $3,000 can be written off against your taxable income each year, with the remainder "carried forward" to offset gains in future years.

2) If I want to invest in foreign markets, say Hong Kong or Bombay, can I still go through American brokers like Ameritrade if I am scared of trusting my money with foreign brokers?

A: Different brokers have different capabilities when it comes to buying foreign shares. Call and ask. But all can buy US-traded foreign securities, as well as US-traded "country funds" that invest in a basket of stocks in, say, Chile or India or France. And from the sound of it, until you get more money and experience (and maybe even then), this would be a wiser course anyway.

3) As an amateur investor am I at a disadvantage because I don’t get to know of things going on till I see them on the news?

A: Yes and no. Certainly, common sense suggests that it should help to be experienced, knowledgeable and "plugged in" to the business world. You are none of these yet. Then again, studies show that a monkey throwing darts tends to do better than most pros (because the monkey is not saddled with sales commissions, fees, expenses or taxes — he’s normally a hypothetical monkey). So if you’re careful and sensible and patient, you may not be at as much of a disadvantage as you might think. Still, inexperience can’t be a plus. Your main job isn’t to try to outsmart the pros competing with you in the market. It’s to develop the habit of investing something every month, and patiently building your stake.

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”

I’ve been kidding around about this for some time, but gosh, that’s good advice. Loan oft loses both itself and friend — we sure know that’s true! And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry — just look at what happened to the over-borrowed economies of Asia.

“Shakespeare wrote it and Polonius says it,” notes reader Gordon Whiting, “but Polonius (being a fictional character) never spoke Danish — and I agree with you that the name sounds more Latin than Danish. But what kind of a name is ‘Hamlet’?”

Hmmm. Dunno.

Gordon continues:

“Shakespeare makes Polonius out to be a pompous fool, but in the particular speech the quote comes from, Shakespeare let Polonius say something intelligent, for a change. Polonius heads the one somewhat-functional family in the play (he’s father to Ophelia and Laertes) and maybe his maxims helped make it that way.

“I love the irony of his famous comment on brevity:

To expostulate on why day is day, night night, and time is time, were nothing but to waste both day, night, and time. Therefore, since brevity be the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. [after he has not been nor will be in what comes next]

“Sorry, I got to play the part of Polonius last year, so some of the lines still stick in my memory.”

Thanks, Gordon! A flight of angels . . .

____________________________________
Husbandry, it may be worth noting for those who did better on their math SATs than their verbals, has nothing to do with keeping your spouse in line. “Economical management” is one Webster’s definition. Keeping to a budget. That sort of thing. Top

A young investment banker I know went bankrupt. He had let his debts get the better of him and had gambled recklessly in the market. But he was of essentially good character and excellent financial prospects, so if only his creditors had borne with him until he got his bonus, everything would have been fine.

“Sure, sure,” said three of his creditors, who had heard it all before. They forced him into bankruptcy over $60,000. Six months later he got a $250,000 bonus and paid off all his creditors. (Except these three. When his rage at them subsides, he may pay them, too. I hope so.)

Now he wants to buy a $300,000 house in Connecticut with $100,000 down. Have you ever tried getting a mortgage after you’ve gone bankrupt? Never mind the circumstances or the size of your down payment: almost no bank will touch it.

But that’s where you or I might come in. You or I might look at this and say, bankruptcy or no, the $300,000 house supports a $200,000 first mortgage. You might not want to lend that kind of money — if you have that kind of money — at 7% for 30 years. I certainly wouldn’t. But how about lending it for two or three years, and at 12% or 14%, say, backed by a first mortgage on the house and by the borrower’s personal guarantee? With the borrower paying all closing costs? And with no prepayment allowed the first year (so you earn your good rate of interest for at least that long)? And with perhaps even a “point” or two thrown in for good measure?

If you have a spare $50,000 or $500,000, that’s the kind of mortgage you might want to make.

Such deals are widely available. There are borrowers who can offer good security but who, for whatever reason, can’t get, or don’t want to try to get, a conventional loan. Or can’t get it as fast as they need it.

To find them, start by contacting mortgage brokers in your area and letting them know you might be a source of funds. You’ll quickly establish whether they have an interest in working with you and what you might expect. A second possibility: local realtors and real estate attorneys, both of whom may frequently encounter buyers in search of mortgage money. A third: take an ad in the real estate section offering to buy existing mortgages — typically, mortgages that sellers were forced to take back in order to move their homes.

It’s crucial to be represented by a knowledgeable, reputable attorney, and to get ample security — or at least an interest rate commensurate with the risk. (If it’s a second mortgage, the going rate can be 16% or more, but it’s all the more important to ascertain the true market value of the property and to obtain other collateral, if possible, such as a mortgage on a second piece of property the borrower may own.)

You must be certain there’s title, fire and flood insurance on the property and that your mortgage is recorded properly. And you should never assume that a property appraised at $200,000 today would yield anything even close to $200,000 in the event of foreclosure. The appraisal might have been high; selling costs will typically eat up at least 6% or 7% of the proceeds; the property could have deteriorated markedly in the meantime and would have to be maintained for the months and months it took to sell it even at a fire-sale price; the bottom could have fallen out of real estate prices in this area or out of the economy as a whole.

For you to lend $30,000 as a second mortgage on a $200,000 house that already carries, say, a $120,000 first mortgage might sound conservative, but it’s not. In a foreclosure, the bank holding the first mortgage would be entitled to $120,000 plus the unpaid interest and back taxes and legal fees . . . so figure maybe $140,000 . . . the property may well have been allowed to go to pot, unpainted, landscaping turned to weeds and muck . . . and on the courthouse steps, $145,000 might be the high bid. In this example, you’d be left with $5,000 of your $30,000, if that. Or else if you thought it was being stolen at $145,000, you could buy the property yourself. In this example, you’d be the high bid at $146,000, say, meaning you’d have to pay $140,000 to the first mortgagee (who might along the way have agreed to work with you with financing), and then you try to sell the place for more. Sure, you could paint it and clean up the yard, and maybe when all was said and done, you’d somehow rescue your $30,000. But you’d be risking a ton of cash and time in order to do so . . . so when push came to shove, you might well not.

All that said, and the very real risks recounted, here is a way for careful investors to earn high interest on large chunks of cash, with some additional effort but little additional risk.

Additional points to note:

• The person who mortgages his property is the mortgagor. You, who lend to him, are the mortgagee. I was so excited when I finally got that straight!

• When the loan matures, in a year or two or three, you may have the opportunity to renew it on similarly favorable terms. The borrower now has an added incentive to stick with you: by doing so, even at an above-market rate, he saves what may be thousands of dollars in a new set of processing fees, points and closing costs. And he saves the hassle.

• The interest you earn is fully subject to income tax.

• If you’d rather not deal with the borrower directly, your lawyer can serve as your trustee, disbursing the loan and collecting the monthly payments.

• Always, always, always, always be prepared for the possibility you might one day have to foreclose on the property, as unlikely as that may seem today. Considering all the costs — financial and emotional — is it something you could do?

Tomorrow: Polonius Speaks

"Lately, I’ve been seeing infomercials that promise big profits from buying ‘government-backed’ tax lien certificates at auction. It smells pretty fishy, but what’s the real story on this?" — Geoff Wisner

I wonder if there’s something inherent in the economics of infomercials that makes all their products a disappointment. I’m not saying there is, just wondering why I’ve never personally encountered happy, successful people with rock-hard stomachs who owe it all to an infomercial. There are presumably hundreds of thousands of such people out there, given the volume of business the successful infomercials do. But the only ones I tend to meet are on TV, on the infomercials themselves.

Funny.

Anyway, however much they’re charging for the tax-lien books or tapes, perhaps I can save it for you with this column.

The basic idea is to earn a safe 10% or 12% or 14% or even more by participating in auctions that some counties hold to collect back property taxes. You pay the tax for the delinquent property owner, and then if for some crazy reason the owner fails to pay you back in a couple of years, you get his property! So you’re virtually guaranteed a nice return on small chunks of dough, or else — "worst case" — you get the property for the price of a couple of years’ taxes.

I did this myself in Dade County, Florida, a decade ago. Worked fine. But I do know that if they’re doing infomercials on it, there’s going to be a lot more competition at the auctions, driving down the return you can earn from doing this. (In effect, the lowest interest rate wins the auction. "I’ll accept an 18% return!" shouts the first bidder. "I’ll take 16%!" counters the second — and before you know it, some annoying soul in the back row has won the bidding by agreeing to accept 9.8%.")

I also know that in some localities — perhaps even in Dade County by now — there are far more pitfalls than there were the year I did it and wrote a column about it for Time. So if you look into this, be careful. (Don’t, for example, buy the tax certificate on some former gas station only to find out that, as the new owner a couple of years from now, you’re liable for some million-dollar environmental cleanup.) But basically, though it’s labor intensive — it tends to be a lot of odd little $1,844 and $2,329 investments, each of which you have to keep track of — I expect this can still make sense in some parts of the country.

The key thing to do, and I doubt the infomercial product can do it for you, is to check out the current rules of the game in your locality. (I suppose you could drive to neighboring counties and states as well, if you really get into this.) Ask your local real estate agent how it works and what can go wrong. Ask the county clerk or whoever runs the auctions. Find out when the auction is held and what you’d need by way of cash and cashier’s checks, etc. to participate. The research is less about the properties on which tax liens will be auctioned — what property isn’t worth two years’ taxes? — but the overall rules of the game. In some areas it’s not as clean and simple as it was in Dade, where you really could be sure you’d get either your interest or the property — free and clear — without further legal expense or contingencies, and without ever having actually to meet or deal with the delinquent taxpayer. (In Dade, the delinquent taxpayer would pay the county, which passed the money on to you.)

Perhaps the best way to research it is to find some friendly soul in the tax collector’s office (and/or some friendly real estate or bankruptcy lawyer) and ask what would happen if you couldn’t pay your property taxes. Would the state ultimately put your debt up for auction? After how long? What if you repaid it? What if you didn’t? What recourse would you have to get it back? What if you didn’t vacate the property? What if you declared bankruptcy? In other words, learn how it works from the other side of the transaction: the guy whose delinquent tax bill you’d be paying.

Of course, the other way to learn about this is go to this year’s auction just to scout it out, asking questions of anyone who’ll talk. Some may paint a rosy picture, but others may want to discourage your competition and thus emphasize the pitfalls.

Some of the people at these auctions will be real estate professionals and real estate lawyers. You might want to work a deal with one of them to serve as your agent at these auctions. Don’t you bother to go each year. Let him go with your $25,000 or $50,000 and a power of attorney (or whatever), and bid for you, for a fee. He’s got to be there anyway; if he can pick up some extra dough for the day, why not?

Needless to say, you’d want to be very careful in making such an arrangement, especially if the chunk of money you were entrusting were significant to you.

For the most part, you get what you pay for in the financial marketplace, if you’re careful — but not more. The reason these things pay more than money market interest is that, at the very least, they require more effort. You’re being paid for lending your money, yes, but also for your time going to the auction, for arranging for the certified checks and the paperwork, and for having your money frozen for a while and not knowing exactly when you’ll get your money back.

So it’s not a free lunch, but it could be worth looking into. All the information you need on this should be available without charge.

I know I am not what you would call an authority on golf, having played only once in my life (and wasn’t that a triumph). And I know that a lot of you get really steamed when the talk in this space strays from matters financial. But golf being as popular as it is, I just feel a responsibility to warn you it is not as benign a pursuit as one might imagine.

Last time I forwarded to you a report on the health hazards (what kills weeds may kill golfers, too). Well, naturally enough, there is also the danger of the errant golf ball. On the local news, I recently saw an incident — all caught on tape, which they played — where some pro hit a ball that conked not one but two spectators, with a ricochet. No one was permanently damaged, thankfully, but both were knocked to the ground (and breathing in, therefore, all the more toxic herbicide).

This reminded me of the time my Aunt Gussie neglected to cry “fore” and drove a ball into my dad’s fore-head. Although this occurred before I was born, it was legend in our family. Aunt Gussie was never our favorite, and I suspect this may be one of the reasons why.

According to The Injury Fact Book, notes faithful reader Kenneth Shirriff, golf resulted in an estimated 18,800 emergency room visits in 1980 and 28 deaths from 1973 to 1980. And though these statistics are old, I know of nothing to suggest the sport has become any safer.

The point is, you can do a lot of damage if you hit that little pockmarked missile wrong — and get yourself into a real pickle, a la the young newlyweds and the genie that I told you about in August.

Golf at your peril.

One of the best books you can read about investing is Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which I have long recommended.

The random walk theory holds that the movement of individual stock prices, or the market as a whole, is largely random, because everything that can be known about which way stocks are headed is already reflected in their price. The market is “efficient.” It evaluates every known fact, hope and worry, and unless you know stuff no one else knows (and why would you?), you have no edge.

I don’t entirely buy that, because it makes market players out to be more coldly rational than I think we actually are. Sometimes things go to irrational extremes.

Even Malkiel doesn’t entirely buy it. If I remember right, he describes himself as “a random walker with a crutch;” i.e., the market is very hard to beat, but not impossible.

Of course, in any given year lots of people will beat it, just as on any given day, there will be some big winners at Las Vegas, even at the slots. But over time, the people who beat the market one year very often underperform it the next year.

Anyway, one of you, Ken Powell, took my recommendation to read this book and reports as follows:

I thought it was an excellent book. I did think, however, that Malkiel rather blithely dismissed the performance of the Peter Lynches and Warren Buffetts of the world. The flip side is that the value investors of the world tend to dismiss efficient-market theory, which is equally crazy. In a sense, they’re relying on the relative efficiency of the market to raise the price of the stock they bought to where it reflects its “true” value. They count on exploiting isolated inefficiencies of the market AND the ultimate overall efficiency of the market.

So, after a fair amount of reading, I think Burton Malkiel has it mostly right, but Benjamin Graham/Warren Buffett also have it mostly right. I get much more enjoyment out of trying my hand at finding “inefficiencies” than in buying an index fund. Fortunately, I can afford to support this hobby. Anyway, thanks for pointing me to Malkiel’s book.

In the interest of full disclosure, perhaps I should tell you that Ken sent me that message in July — 1996. It can take me a while to get to these things. But in this case it surely doesn’t matter. The debate over efficient markets never dies.

The answer would seem to be: In a place like America, with big stocks, widely followed, and lots of rules on accounting and disclosure, the market is largely efficient. But even there, a big insight . . . like the way the end of the Cold War could lead to globalization and a boost for stocks like Coca-Cola, which Buffett bought just a few years ago at a tiny fraction of today’s price . . . well, was that luck? Or does it help to be really smart and common sensical? My guess is that it helps. But common sense also suggests that most amateurs are not likely to beat the pros, working at it full time — not least because most pros don’t manage to beat the averages either.

Yesterday I described how it was possible you might have found yourself among the 5.9 billion people on the planet who missed Beyond Wall Street, the eight-part PBS documentary I got to host with my friend and colleague Jane Bryant Quinn.

Today, to make your pain all the more exquisite, the sadist in me sketches out what you missed. Each of the eight half hours focused on a single star:

1. Foster Friess, whom I interviewed at his huge log cabin in Jackson, Wyoming, elected Jesus Christ chairman of his board some years ago, and is as sunny and positive a presence as I’ve ever encountered. But we didn’t select him for this or because he has a pet pig named Wilbur to whom he turns occasionally for 450 pounds of porcine investment advice. Rather, in overseeing upward of $10 billion, Foster embodies a style of investing that shouldn’t work but does, jumping from one stock to another in hope of catching huge updrafts in growth stocks just before they occur — and kicking out the winners as soon as a more promising prospect comes along, never mind the taxes.

2. John Neff, whom I met at his home outside Philadelphia. He’s my kind of investor, stubbornly buying the stuff others don’t want — like Citicorp, once upon a time — knowing that one day the cycle will likely turn and they’ll want it again. I had long “known” Neff from his annual appearances in Barron’s roundtable. He racked up a famous record at the helm of the Windsor Fund, from which he not long ago retired.

3. Barr Rosenberg does it all by computer. Except the one part you might expect to be done by computer — the actual trading. At his Orinda, California, firm, that’s done by humans. But the computer decides what to buy or sell, and the level of intelligence that goes into its software, along with the billions of bits of data that stream into it every day from around the world, are awesome. When I playfully reached down to one of the cables and asked “what would happen if I unplugged this?” Barr’s composure held — but barely. Brilliant, contemplative, unexpected (he raises chickens but, being Buddhist, will not kill them), he begs the question: can a computer beat the market? (Answer: his hasn’t, lately. Then again, neither has mine.)

4. Bill Sharpe showed me a replica of his 1990 Nobel Prize, the real one being in a safe deposit someplace, and drove me around his Palo Alto neighborhood in a 1965 Citroen Deux Chevaux — and I actually got paid for this. It was Sharpe who pointed out that beating the market is only an achievement when the risk you took to do it is factored into the equation. And he wrote the equation. How does he invest much of his own money? Index funds.

5. Mark Mobius is our man in Thailand. And Singapore. And 40 other emerging markets we didn’t follow him to. It’s a big world out there, and drifting down Bangkok’s Chao Praya River at midnight, and then visiting a factory that very likely makes the black nylon fabric in the umbrella that keeps you dry, I learned a good bit about it. This was before Asia collapsed. Take baht, Mark. And baht! And baht, and baht and baht!

6. Bill Gross manages $90 billion or so in bonds, which has to be really boring until you realize that he somehow manages to squeeze an extra 1% return out of his portfolio year after year — an extra $900 million. But the image that impressed me even more, as we looked from his Laguna Beach living room out over the Pacific, was of a 53-year-old man determined to live to 100, getting it into his mind to run from Carmel to the Golden Gate Bridge — five back-to-back marathons over five successive days. On the last day of this run, his kidney ruptured. Blood was running down his leg. But he hadn’t reached the bridge, so he kept running. Only when he finished did he allow the ambulance to whisk him away.

7. Gary Brinson, in Chicago, showed me a graph (although my eye did keep wandering to the Monet) which demonstrated something both interesting and important. Even though foreign stocks — Japanese stocks, say — are riskier than U.S. stocks, you can actually reduce the risk of your own portfolio, at the same time as you juice up your expected return a bit, by adding them to your mix. And this is a guy who oversees $120 billion, or, we calculated, roughly one quarter of one percent of all the investable assets in the world. So listen up.

8. Peter Bernstein, it turned out, went to my high school way back when, had known my dad shortly after World War II, and now here we were in a helicopter off Santa Barbara flying to oil rig Irene to talk about risk. He’d recently published a whole book on the subject, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, a bestseller. As we landed on the rig in a stiff wind, hundreds of feet above the rough sea and the sharks below — well, I think there were sharks — the setting seemed right. Although a long-time horizon helps to reduce the risks, investing is anything but a smooth ride.

What I learned from these eight: First, there is more than one way to skin a cat. No single investment style is the “right” one. Second, each of these people had consistently done his homework, putting far more time and effort and passion into this than you or I would ever be likely to. Third, when we invest, these folks, and others like them, are our competition.

*

The lion’s share of the work on our TV series was done not by Jane or me but by a terrifically talented writer/director/producer named Eugene Shirley. Join us next fall, when we hope again to take you . . . beyond Wall Street.

Paul Kroger: “What happened to the PBS series you referred to in your visit to Louise months ago?”

It wasn’t Louise, it was Irene — an oil rig off the Santa Barbara coast — and the eight-part series, Beyond Wall Street, which I co-host with Jane Bryant Quinn, has finished running in many cities.

One of the glories of public television is that shows air at different times on different days in different cities, so you have to be very intelligent to know when anything’s on — which is how PBS sifts out the riffraff. No one has any idea when anything is on except Wall Street Week, Fridays at 8:30 p.m. In New York, we were on right after Wall Street Week. In Los Angeles, where everyone is asleep by ten, we were on Sundays at midnight. In Chicago, Saturdays at 7 a.m. (“I’ve got an idea, honey! Let’s set the alarm for 6:30 after a hard week’s work so we can bolt out of bed and have breakfast in front of the TV watching guys talk about p/e ratios!”) My favorite was Seattle, where I went to the local affiliate to tape an interview for my book tour. (OK, OK, if you insist, click here to solve all your last-minute holiday shopping problems.) The host explained that my interview would be half the show. Next week he’d be taping Jane Bryant Quinn for the other half — did I know her? “Know her,” I replied, “I’m crazy about her — and we co-host a PBS series that airs on your station.”

Now, I’m not saying I’d expect the average Seattleite to know our show was on. The average Seattleite has $18 million in Microsoft stock options and spends most of his or her time buying pro sports franchises. Or else building airplanes or brewing cappuccino. But this was the host of a local PBS show . . . indeed, their show about money.

“You have a PBS series?” he asked with warm interest. “What’s it called?”

A series of phone calls was required to ascertain that the show was indeed on his station, Sundays at 1 p.m., and had been airing for several weeks.

But I’m not complaining. I had the best of all possible worlds. I can legitimately say I co-hosted a PBS series without having to worry that anyone actually saw me.

There’s some talk of a new round of shows for the fall. But with luck, if it happens, no one will know about that either.

Tomorrow: What You Missed