The world was very young then, and many things did not yet have names, and to indicate them it was necessary to point." -Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Ah! as the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder by and by nor spare a sigh though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; and yet you will weep and know why"- Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring And Fall To A Young Child"
When I was a boy I often took a bus during the holidays from my small (8,000) home town of Clinton, South Carolina, for the 40-mile trip to the metropolis of Greenville (then maybe 40,000). Greenville had one brokerage with a viewable ticker tape, Thomson and McKinnon, and I delighted in sitting among the old guys in shabby suits who were glued to it. They tested me with questions about which companies the tickers stood for and I could generally answer them because the office manager gave me month-old copies of the Standard and Poor's gray book. He also let me take anything else I wanted from brokerage material spread out on a big table. I started doing this around 1957.
Nothing could have been more fun, especially as I got taken to lunch by my war hero uncle - my personal hero - an actuary/mathematician who had worked out pretty much everything about option time decay that Black and Scholes eventually got a Nobel Prize for. He explained the convertibility of puts and calls, and everything you need to know about straddles, with which he did buy/writes off the ads which were then in the margins of the Wall Street Journal. My uncle was not a fundamental investor. He explained once that he preferred stocks without earnings, like Transitron Electronics, because earnings just complicated the pure math
