Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

KIRK KAZANJIAN
at yesterday’s sales on a specific product in a particular store. He
doesn’t have to wait. It’s instantaneous. If you’ve got too much of a
product, you simply stop producing it for a week. There is now no
reason for inventories to get six months out of control.”
EXPERIENCE COUNTS…IF YOU’RE WILLING TO
CHANGE
Born in 1927, Papp has decades of experience under his belt. He
confesses to being somewhat prejudiced against all of the recent college
graduates who are being allowed to manage billions of mutual
fund dollars these days. “I think the really young ones will continue
to underperform the market,” he predicts. “For one thing, I believe
experience is worth something. It’s not going to make a difference
between a star and a bum, but it should let you perform a couple of
percentage points better than average, provided that it doesn’t drag
you down to the point where you’re unwilling to do new things and
accept change. I think I’ve proven I’m willing to change and look at
the future. That’s rare for someone my age. I’m different. But then
I’ve spent my whole life being different.”
Many investors of Papp’s generation have been bearish for years.
Most of them missed out on the bull market of the 1980s and 1990s,
and, as a result, have significantly underperformed their benchmark
averages. Papp thinks he knows why. “They don’t realize we’ve gone
from a steel to a silicon society,” he surmises. “Two thousand years
ago, there were only a few things that were regarded as storehouses
of value. One was real estate. The others were coins, precious metals
(gold and silver), and artifacts (soft durable goods). Then along came
the industrial revolution in the 1700s, and the invention of stocks,
bonds, and paper money. We moved away from the hard stuff to
softer instruments. We became an industrial society. Now, we are an
information society. The storehouses of value are much different. In
today’s world, one storehouse of value is having a special talent or
skill. Another is knowledge and education. A third is smarts. As an
example, baseball players, movie stars, and singers never earned a
fantastic amount of money before. Today, they make fortunes.
“Let’s take this another step,” he continues. “Corporations used to
be owned by wealthy families and were handed down from generation
to generation. Now, they are owned by institutions, and top managers
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