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The only reason they have it is because...The most important thing for me in the stock market is knowing what you own. I'm surprised by the number of people who own shares. They wouldn't be able to tell you why they possess them. They couldn't tell you in a minute or less why they own them. In fact, if you push them hard, they'd say, "The reason I have this is because it's going up." I mean, that's the only reason.
That's the only reason they own them. And if you can't explain it to them—I'm serious, you can't explain to a 10- year-old in 2 minutes or less why you have a stock—you shouldn't have it. And that's true, I believe, for about 80% of people who own shares. And this is the kind of stock that people like to have.
This is the kind of company that people love to have. They are relatively simple companies; they manufacture a very specific and easy-to- understand product. They manufacture a 1-megabit bipolar CMOS SRAM hazardous floating- point data I/O array processor with an optimizing compiler , a dual-port 16 memory, a double-diffusion metal-oxide semiconductor monolithic logic chip with a plasma matrix vacuum fluorescent display .
It has a dual 16-bit memory. It has a Unix operating system, four megaflop Whetstone polysilicon emitters, high bandwidth (that's very important), a 6 GHz dual metallization communication protocol and asynchronous backward compatibility , a peripheral bus architecture , four-way interleaved memory, a token ring exchange backplane, and it does it in 15 nanoseconds of capacity.
However, if you have a piece of junk like that , you'll never make any money. Never. Someone will appear with more Whetstones or fewer Whetstones, or with larger or smaller megaflops. You'll have no idea what happened. And people buy this garbage all the time. I earned money at Dunkin' Donuts. I could understand that.
When there were recessions, I did n't have to worry about what was happening. I would go there and people would still be there. I didn't have to worry about the low prices of Korean imports. I mean , I just didn't have it... I can understand that. And you laugh. I made 10 or 15 times my money at Dunkin' Donuts.
That 's the kind of action I can understand. If you don't understand it, it won't work. This is the most important principle. And it bothers me that people are so careful with their money. When the public buys a refrigerator , they obtain consumer reports. They buy a microwave oven, they do it. They ask people what is the best type of radar range or what type of car to buy.
They are investigating. About apartments. When they go to Wyoming, they get the Mobil Travel Guide or California. When they go to Europe, they get the Michelin Travel Guide. People hear an advertisement on a bus about a stock and put half their life savings into it before the sun sets. And they wonder why they lose money in the stock market.
And when they lose money, they blame the institutions and trading programs. That's garbage. They didn't investigate. They bought a part. They didn't look at the balance sheet. And that's what they get in return. And that's what they were leading us to. And it's self-fulfilling . The public is terribly uninformed and says it has no chance.
That's because that's how it acts. I'm trying to convince people that there is a method. There are reasons for the stock to rise. Coca-Cola, this is truly magical. It's a very magical number. Easy to remember. Coca-Cola is earning 30 times per share what it earned 32 years ago. The shares have risen 30 times.
Bethlehem Steel is earning less than it was 30 years ago. The shares are at half the price they were 30 years ago. Stocks are not lottery tickets. Behind every stock there is a company. The company is doing well, the stock is doing well. It 's not that complicated. People get carried away too much. And, first of all, they try to predict the stock market .
That's a total waste of time. Nobody can predict the stock market. They try to predict interest rates. I mean, this is... If someone could correctly predict interest rates three times in a row, they'd be a multi-millionaire. Given that there aren't that many billionaires on the planet, it's very ...
you know, it made sense, so I made a syllogism while studying these topics at Boston College. There can't be that many people who can predict interest rates because there would be too many billionaires. And nobody can predict the economy. I know that many people in this room were here in 1981 and 1982, when we had a prime rate of 20%, with double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment.
I don't remember anyone telling me that in 1981. I didn't read or study all of this. I don't remember anyone telling me that we were going to have the worst recession since the depression. So what I'm trying to tell you is that it would be very useful to know what the stock market is going to do. It would be fantastic to know that the Dow Jones average in a year will be X, that we are going to have a large- scale recession, or that interest rates are going to be 12%.
That's useful. Although you would never know. You simply never learn it. That's why I 've always said that if you dedicate 14 minutes a year to economics, you'll have wasted 12 minutes. And I truly believe it.
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