Temco Services, Online Services

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.