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Pastimes : The Darwin Awards for Investing

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To: Edwarda who wrote (12)	11/2/1999 3:12:00 AM
From: EL KABONG!!!	Read Replies (2) of 52

Edwarda, One of my favorite Darwin nominees is a guy I used to work with. He was a pretty high ranking finance guy, so he knew how to do DD and stuff like that. And he knew not to accept (or give) stock tips no matter how good it may look. He comes into work one Monday real excited and is telling everyone he knows (that invests) to join him at lunch; hot stock tip of the century. So about 6 of us go to lunch with him. Voices are lowered and everything is hush-hush (sort of like that old EF Hutton television ad) and he says Western Savings Bank (or something like that) very softly. Where did he get this hot tip from? His neighbor's kid, that's where. But the kid's father is a successful stock broker, so the kid (about 21 or so at the time) must know what he's talking about. So we all join in this impromptu conversation regarding this bank, the pluses and minuses and stuff like that. One of us even went to a brokerage to pick up an analysis and a prospectus and whatever other material they had. Well, we all get together later (except for the original guy) and we look at this stock and it's risky as hell; not a BB mind you, but a lot of risky debt and stuff. This is right around the time that the Feds were shutting down banks and savings & loans left and right. We're all getting cold feet now. What had seemed like a sure thing a few minutes earlier wasn't. So we did what I always do in these situations: procrastinate. Tuesday stock up... Wednesday stock up... Thursday stock up... Friday, the original tipster arrives and we all go to lunch with him again. We're all wimps for not buying this stock. No guts... No glory... As we're riding to the pizza place in the van, the guy on the radio is announcing that Western Savings Bank just went bankrupt... You had to be there to see someone literally turn white as a ghost. And I do mean white. An appropriate awkward period of silence... He never did tell us how many shares of this thing he bought, but it must of been a lot. Procrastination sometimes pays off... KJC

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