Posted 1:14 AM by Blah blah

Web wife jilted on the auction block (The Register). This is just too weird. Background info. Her online auction entry: Kay Hammond, Internet Entrepreneur, Looking for a Husband.

The odds are against stock pickers (CBS MarketWatch):

Millions of investors think they, or somebody they hire, can successfully pick individual stocks.

But this is a challenge that eludes even the best and brightest of investors -- for reasons that aren't hard to find.

Q. I keep reading about how great index funds are, but I know people who've beaten the market year after year by picking good stocks. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to find great companies, invest in them and then hang on for the long term. Why don't you and other advisers admit that index funds are only average?

It's inevitable that every year some stock pickers will beat the market. That's a matter of random events, otherwise known as luck. But it's rare to find anybody, including professionals, who can beat the market year after year.

Only one mutual fund manager has beaten the Standard & Poor's 500 Index every year since 1990: Bill Miller at Legg Mason Value Trust. Even Miller, one of the best stock pickers of our time, lost money in his fund in 2000 and 2001. And he lagged 95 percent of other value funds in 2000 and was beaten by 74 percent of them in 2001.

Most mutual fund managers are highly compensated, highly motivated and backed by highly trained research staffs. These people are clearly some of the best brains in the country. You'd think they could succeed by picking the best companies and holding them.

But if it were that easy, everybody would do it. Why isn't it that easy?

Changes that can't be predicted are now common in American business. In 1957, there were 500 stocks in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. Forty years later, in 1997, only 74 of those companies were still in the index. The rest are gone. Some were merged into other companies, but many just couldn't keep up with the rapid pace of change and were shoved aside by newer competitors.

Now imagine that in 1957 you had somehow been smart enough to pick the 74 surviving companies and invested in them. Your results would have been disappointing: You would have underperformed the index by more than 20 percent, according to Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan in their book, Creative Destruction.

Why? Perhaps it's the luck of the draw. Of those 74 companies only a dozen outperformed the index from 1957 through 1998, according to these authors. That's 12 companies out of 500, or 2.4 percent of the total, that were above average for 42 years.

That, of course, is the past. Before these two business experts published their book last year, they looked into the future with a huge amount of knowledge and insight that wasn't available in 1957. Their book focuses on "companies that are built to last." So their ideas might be useful to anybody trying to pick stocks today that will stand the test of time.

Early in the book, Foster and Kaplan state that "no more than a third of today's major corporations will survive in an economically important way over the next 25 years." Those survivors, they say, will have to be masters at re-creating themselves and their businesses.

"Never again will American business be as it once was. The rules have changed forever," they wrote. "Some companies have made the crossing." The authors then cite four U.S. companies as examples of the new leaders: General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Corning and Enron.

Enron? Yes, Enron.

The company that's now the center of one of the largest corporate scandals in U.S. history "has made strong progress by transforming itself from a natural gas pipeline company to a trading company," the authors wrote. Of the four companies, they said, "These are the exceptions. Few have attempted the journey. Fewer still have made it to the other side successfully."

This is not meant to pick on these authors. In fact, quite the contrary: They were working from the best information and insights they had. And in less than a year, one of their prime examples makes them look silly. The point is that picking tomorrow's business winners is tougher than it seems, even with all the time and resources of experts writing a book.

Investors who try to pick the best long-term investments run the risk of falling into the exact same trap.

Investors can try to overcome this problem in many possible ways. The most common way is to try to pick the smartest stock pickers. But just as today's most promising stock can become an embarrassment, today's smartest stock-picking guru is likely to become tomorrow's average manager.

But the best way to overcome this problem is to accept the constantly changing nature of the business world. It's easy and inexpensive to let the market itself do the work. The vehicle is a Standard & Poor's 500 Index fund, the biggest of which is Vanguard 500 Index Fund.

In the case of Enron, the index automatically protected investors through a very basic technique: diversification. Even when it was the third-largest company in the index, Enron made up less than 2 percent of the portfolio.

Some people think the S&P 500 Index is only "average." But of the thousands of mutual funds in business, only one has beaten that index in each of the past 12 calendar years. That certainly makes the index good enough for me.