Last One Picked At The Playground, Part One
So, what do I predict for the upcoming year? As if anyone actually asked.
Drawing from inspiration gathered at last week’s well attended geek conference headlined by Nolan Bushnell, I came away with three interesting assumptions. The first dealt with brands and what certain companies must do in the coming year to succeed. Let’s call it transparency, environmental initiatives and visable intergrity. Big words for such unealistic expectations.
Let’s take the current investment holder of my 401 K. (It’s more of a 101K at the moment, but that’s another story). This southern bank had quite a good year in 2006, but like everyone else in the sector it has taken quite a hit recently. I was thinking of rolling over my funds to another bank when I checked them out on Google.
Ooops. A few nasty legal and SEC issues came up that in a perfect world should have been disclosed to me when I first contacted them. So I asked, "what’s up with that?" I was told that these issues were documented in their SEC filing and they were never found guilty of any wrong doing and had a perfectly logical explanation for all of it plus it’s in the small print of every application that covers the risks of investing in their funds. Blah, blah, blah…
So, in 2009 are we still dealing with the 192 year old caveat emptor when investing with a so-called respected financial institution? Well, yes we are. And, that’s the problem with the call for transparency.
In 1817, a certain trader bought 110,000 pounds of tobacco at a price hours before a treaty with Britain was signed. The signing of the treaty drastically reduced the value of the tobacco and the trader wanted relief from the court.
Chief Justice Marshall’s unanimous decision stated that that it "would be difficult to circumscribe the contrary doctrine within proper limits, where the means of intelligence are equally accessible to both parties. Which meant that the trader had access to the news of the treaty but failed to make use of it.
What this means to me is that we all have resources at our fingertips - blogs, forums, RSS feeds and government filings. We can now access information about companies that can neither hide from nor effectively coverup wrong doings. Well, in most cases.
I know it is unrealistic to research every product or service we buy, but to expect companies even in the golden age of change to do our work for us is simply not gonna happen.
Next week: Last One Picked At The Playground, Part Two – "Watched TV Lately? Didn’t Think So."
