Professor Bainbridge on Senator Bill Frist’s HCA stock sale – two weeks before a disappointing earnings announcement which caused the stock to fall 15%. I’ve noted before that a recent study demonstrated that Senators beat the market 12%, while corporate insiders are 5% better than the market and the typical US household underperforms. Unsurprisingly, the SEC is NOT investigating this interesting fact.
Daily Archives: September 25, 2005
Country Collectors
The fact that news of this probably has never reached you attests to what an impossibly distant and godforsaken place Bouvet Island is. Only a few dozen humans have ever left their footprints on it, and it’s a safe bet most of them would happily have passed on the honor.
But there is a small and obsessive group of people scheming, plotting, cajoling and ultimately trying to buy their way there. They are known as country collectors, and they spend their lifetimes journeying to the farthest and most obscure reaches of the globe, from Abkhazia to Umm Al Qaiwain, filling their passports with rare and exotic stamps. Bouvet Island is to them what Everest is to peak baggers, what the British Guiana 1c magenta is to philatelists, what the Apple Tree Girl 141X is to collectors of Hummel figurines.
Only a tiny handful of country collectors — precisely eight by one estimate, “not quite 20” by another — have ever managed to cross Bouvet off their lists. The most recent is a 40-year-old dot-com millionaire from San Francisco, Charles Veley, and he believes this, along with all his other peregrinations, qualifies him as the most well-traveled person in the history of the world.
The Art of Selling
Ben Stein writes well about the Art of Selling, and a good salesperson truly practices art:
In other words, align your interests with those of the buyer. Don’t try to shove something down his throat. Don’t try to hoodwink him. Just listen to what he needs and wants, see if you have the good or service he needs and wants and then arrange to make it easy to buy. Make sure that the buyer is a real buyer with a real need, a real timetable to buy and the real means to buy. Then satisfy that need.
It is also important to be a friend to your buyer. In fact, I observe that almost all success in life comes down to being a friend to someone: a friend to the voter, a friend to the judge, a friend to your spouse, a friend to the client, a friend to your parents. As Miller said so aptly, you have to not just be liked, but “well liked.”