As consumers age and need fewer things, the demand for services will increase. In addition to financial and home services and life management planning services (including career and family advice).

Home Reconfiguration In addition to beautifying their homes floor master suites and laundry rooms and handicapaccessible doorways and bathrooms. And those with financial freedom may buy second homes.

/ choose styles of clothing that give them comfort and good fit, retailers, like Chico’s, that provide quality, stylish, comfortable Services Galore travel services, consumers will want to buy more daily chore with nicer furniture and decor, consumers will likely begin changing their homes to adapt to their changing lifestyles.

Many will look to stay in their homes longer, opting for firstThe bottom line is that firms need to monitor these types of trends to anticipate how aging baby boomers are likely to change / their wants and buying behavior.

emotional chord in all of us with his tribute to the September tragedy, but he represented well the emotions of boomers. The Rolling Stones relate to the desires of boomers to be active, energetic, and young at heart, as Aerosmith connects with the lifestyle and desires of fans who want to be young again, not defined by the traditional chronological definitions of age.

Even with the desire to be young again, boomers can’t escape the realities of aging, including natural weight gain. In fact, most women in the United States today wear size 14 or higher. Lane Bryant, a 100 year old brand in the $32 billion plus size market, celebrates curves and uses rock and roll to help position its brand as hip and upbeat. Its 2003 fashion show featured Roseanne Barr as emcee, singer Kelly Osbourne, who endorses Lane Bryant fashions, and model Mia Tyler-daughter of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler. Lane Bryant’s 2002 runway show featured KISS, singing the opening words “You show us everything you got,” from “Rock and Roll All Night” as the lingerie clad women strutted their stuff on the runway. Jennifer Peterson, director of brand development at Lane Bryant, says, “The brand is empowering women by making them feel better about themselves and their bodies.” By focusing on sexy plus size fashions with rock and roll stars, sales in the 18 to 34 group of women also have increased by percent without losing any of the older age groups.

Nearly everyone interested in common stocks wants to be told by someone else what he thinks the market is going to do. The demand being there, it must be supplied.

Their interpretations and forecasts of business conditions, of 260 The Intelligent Investorcourse, are much more authoritative and informing. These are an important part of the great body of economic intelligence which is spread continuously among buyers and sellers of securities and tends to create fairly rational prices for stocks and bonds under most circumstances. Undoubtedly the material published by the financial services adds to the store of information available and fortifies the investment judgment of their clients.

It is difficult to evaluate their recommendations of individual securities. Each service is entitled to be judged separately, and the verdict could properly be based only on an elaborate and inclusive study covering many years. In our own experience we have noted among them a pervasive attitude which we think tends to impair what could otherwise be more useful advisory work. This is their general view that a stock should be bought if the near term prospects of the business are favorable and should be sold if these are unfavorable-regardless of the current price. Such a superficial principle often prevents the services from doing the sound analytical job of which their staffs are capable-namely, to ascertain whether a given stock appears over or undervalued at the current price in the light of its indicated long term future earning power.

The leading investment counsel firms make no claim to being brilliant; they do pride themselves on being careful, conservative, and competent. Their primary aim is to conserve the principal value over the years and produce a conservatively acceptable rate of income. Any accomplishment beyond that-and they do strive to better the goal-they regard in the nature of extra service rendered. Perhaps their chief value to their clients lies in shielding them from costly mistakes. They offer as much as the defensive investor has the right to expect from any counselor serving the general public.

What we have said about the well established investmentcounsel firms applies generally to the trust and advisory services of the larger banks.*

Financial Services

The so called financial services are organizations that send out uniform bulletins (sometimes in the form of telegrams) to their subscribers. The subjects covered may include the state and prospects of business, the behavior and prospect of the securities markets, and information and advice regarding individual issues.

There is often an “inquiry department” which will answer questons affecting an individual subscriber. The cost of the service averages much less than the fee that investment counselors charge their individual clients. Some organizations-notably Babson’s and Standard & Poor’s-operate on separate levels as a financial service and as investment counsel. (Incidentally, other organizaThe Investor and His Advisers

• The character of investment counseling firms and trust banks has not

changed, but today they generally do not offer their services to investors with less than $1 million in financial assets; in some cases, $5 million or more is required. Today thousands of independent financial planning firms perform very similar functions, although (as analyst Robert Veres puts it) the mutual fund has replaced blue chip stocks as the investment of choice and diversification has replaced “quality” as the standard of safety.tions-such as Scudder, Stevens & Clark-operate separately as investment counsel and as one or more investment funds.) The financial services direct themselves, on the whole, to a quite different segment of the public than do the investment counsel firms. The latters’ clients generally wish to be relieved of bother and the need for making decisions. The financial services offer information and guidance to those who are directing their own financial affairs or are themselves advising others. Many of these services confine themselves exclusively, or nearly so, to forecasting market movements by various “technical” methods. We shall dismiss these with the observation that their work does not concern “investors” as the term is used in this article.

Instead of stargazing, Streisand should have been channeling Graham.

The intelligent investor never dumps a stock purely because its share price has fallen; she always asks first whether the value of the company’s underlying businesses has changed.pled from the companies that had issued them-pure abstractions, just blips moving across a TV or computer screen. If the blips were moving up, nothing else mattered.

On December 20, 1999, Juno Online Services unveiled a trailblazing business plan: to lose as much money as possible, on purpose.

Juno announced that it would henceforth offer all its retail services for free-no charge for e mail, no charge for Internet access-and that it would spend millions of dollars more on advertising over the next year.

On this declaration of corporate hara kiri, Juno’s stock roared up from $16.375 to $66.75 in two days.

Why bother learning whether a business was profitable, or what goods or services a company produced, or who its management was, or even what the company’s name was? All you needed to know about stocks was the catchy code of their ticker symbols: CBLT, INKT, PCLN, TGLO, VRSN, WBVN.

That way you could buy them even faster, without the pesky two second delay of looking them up on an Internet search engine. In late 1998, the stock of a tiny, rarely traded building maintenance company, Temco Services, nearly tripled in a matter of minutes on record high volume. Why? In a bizarre form of financial dyslexia, thousands of traders bought Temco after mistaking its ticker symbol, TMCO, for that of Ticketmaster Online (TMCS), an Internet darling whose stock began trading publicly for the first time that day.