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Non-Tech : James Cramer -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Adam Weiner who wrote (652)	6/14/1999 11:10:00 PM
From: mr.mark	Respond to of 766

excerpt from A Random Walk Down Wall Street by BURTON G. MALKIEL What Is a Random Walk? A random walk is one in which future steps or directions cannot be predicted on the basis of past actions. When the term is applied to the stock market, it means that short-run changes in stock prices cannot be predicted. Investment advisory services, earnings predictions, and complicated chart patterns are useless. On Wall Street, the term "random walk" is an obscenity. It is an epithet coined by the academic world and hurled insultingly at the professional soothsayers. Taken to its logical extreme, it means that a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper's financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by the experts. Now, financial analysts in pin-striped suits do not like being compared with bare-assed apes. They retort that academics are so immersed in equations and Greek symbols (to say nothing of stuffy prose) that they couldn't tell a bull from a bear, even in a china shop. wwnorton.com