to reporters and analysts. But if evenpro forma earnings are poor, then the time to announce is late at night, aftermost news organizations have closed up shop or have only one reporter onduty. The best time of all for discreet announcements of bad news is late on aFriday, after newspaper editors have put the weekend business sections to bedand left the office.Any junior reporter is expected to find the obvious red herrings in earnings reports. In the first week on the job, the reporter learns that a glowing account of record sales in the first paragraph is often followed by understatedreferences to a decline in profits or margins. No self-respecting beginnerwould ever miss the announcement buried in the seventeenth paragraph thatthe auditors quit rather than sign off on the latest financials, or that Chief Executive Smith, 49, is retiring immediately to pursue other interests and spendmore time with the family.But an arms race of sorts developed. The more sophisticated financial reporters became, the better the weapons thecompanies used to fool them. Companies developed an
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amazing capacity to report earnings that top those of the correspondingquarter of the previous year. General Electric, for example, reported 38 consecutive increases in quarterly earnings beginning in the third quarter of1993. From the first quarter of 1995 through the third quarter of 2000, all ofthe increases were between 11 percent and 16 percent, except for gains of 18percent, 21 percent, and 20 percent, respectively, in the first three quartersof 2000. One theory is that General Electric puts its profits in silos and takesthem out as needed. But General Electric’s practice of “managing earnings”was just the beginning. As the twentieth century drew to a close, a rage developed among corporate finance officers for pro forma statements, off-balance sheet debt, and off-income statement losses.Enron was the acknowledged leader in the new way of accounting. “General Electric’s next chairman may want to borrow a lesson or two from Enron,which has been voted America’s most innovative company five years runningand displaced General Electric as the ‘best managed company’ in Fortunemagazine’s last ‘most admired’ survey,” wrote management consultant GaryHamel admiringly in the September 18, 2000, Wall Street Journal. Investorswho probed too deeply risked being publicly called an “ass,” as thenEnron Chairman Jeff Skilling called Richard Grubman, a Boston hedge fundmanager who dared ask for a balance sheet at an April 17, 2001, earningsnews conference. (We received similar treatment when we requested a noholds-barred interview with a General Electric executive in 2002. Not onlywere we informed that all their executives were too busy to meet with us; wewere told never to call General Electric again.)Within the weeks after Enron’s dramatic plunge from stock marketstar to bankruptcy in November 2001, however, all earnings reports cameunder suspicion, even those of General Electric and other companies that foryears had been above reproach. Newly skeptical investors beat one companyafter another to within an inch of its life. General Electric, the world’s mosthighly valued company, fell 39 percent in the first nine months of 2002. Criticism of General Electric’s accounting was so widespread that the company developed a new mantra: “We manage companies, not earnings.” IBM dropped6 percent on February 15, 2002, when the New York Times reported that thecomputer maker didn’t disclose that fourth-quarter earnings had been increased by the sale of a subsidiary product line.10 Tyco International Ltd., Computer Associates, and Sprint Corporation were caught up in the chill.The truth is that many companies try to prettify their earnings one way oranother. In the sidebar (pp. 55–58), we enumerate some considerations totake into account when evaluating reported earnings.
Chapter 2 • Earnings Propaganda
67
Wall Street’s Cheery AnalystsInvestors once counted on analysts to provide objective evaluations of corporate self-portraits. But in the late 1990s, analysts had been drafted into becoming rainmakers for their firms’ underwriting departments. Gloomyreports were banished to avoid the possibility of lost public offering fees. Statistics on the number of buy, hold, and sell recommendations for the years1997–2002 put this in perspective (see Table 2.1).Until the market’s devastating plunge in 2000–2002, the media largelyignored the co-opting of the analysts. Analysts had become celebrities, andcelebrities are valued commodities in the news business. Journalists wereunder pressure to beat rival news organizations in snagging interviews withbulls like Henry Blodget and Abby Joseph Cohen. During the waning days ofthe twentieth century, hot news was having a sexy reporter speak “direct fromthe NYSE floor” to an analyst who just upgraded a Nasdaq-listed company recently taken public by his firm. The public’s appetite for such material waslimitless; as recently as the year 2000, the Silicon Investor Web site hosted 26chat boards devoted to the leading business network, CNBC.Wall Street’s brokerages have always distributed analyst reports aslagniappes, to make the inflated commissions they charge to retail customersand money management firms more palatable. Before the Securities and Exchange Commission took steps in 1999 to eliminate the practice, analyststreated favored customers to not-yet-public information gleaned from privateconversations with corporate executives.Analysts ended up taking the fall for the Internet crash. On May 21,2002, Merrill Lynch paid $100 million to settle charges that its Internetgroup had maintained misleading ratings on stocks underwritten by the
Table 2.1
Analyst Recommendations, January 1997–March 2002
Year
Number ofRecommendations
Buy (%)
Hold (%)
Sell (%)
19971998199920002001Jan–Mar 2002
425,087748,4501,010,2351,373,1071,482,100359,881
74.067.867.173.365.362.6
23.730.430.925.032.034.2
2.31.82.01.72.73.2
Source: Bloomberg L.P.
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firm. The settlement came after New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer released excerpts of e-mails showing that analysts privately disparaged companies they publicly recommended.At the time in question, Merrill’s rating system had five categories:1. Buy2. Accumulate3. Neutral4. Reduce5. SellRatings could be shaded, with 1–1 being higher than 1–3 and so forth.Spitzer put together e-mail comments with published ratings in Table 2.2.In sworn testimony, Merrill’s senior Internet analyst, Henry Blodget,and his subordinate, Kirsten Campbell, both confirmed that the group neverrated a stock 4 or 5, according to an affidavit filed by Spitzer. “In lieu of assigning reduce or sell recommendations to stocks they no longer favored,the Internet group instead merely quietly stopped covering the stock, without any announcement or meaningful explanation to the retail public.”
Table 2.2PublishedCompany
E-Mail Comments
Date
Analyst Comments
Rating
Aether System (AETH)Excite@home (ATHM)
3/15/0112/27/9912/29/99
“ fundamentals horrible”“we are neutral on the stock”Six-month outlook is “ flat ” withoutany “real catalysts” for improvement seen.
3-12-1
Excite@home (ATHM)
6/3/00
“such a piece of crap”
2-1
GoTo.com
1/11/01
Nothing interesting about company“except banking fees”
3-1
InfoSpace (INSP)
7/13/00
“This stock is a powder keg, givenhow aggressive we were on it earlierthis year and given the ‘bad smell’comments that so many institutionsare bringing up”
1-1
InfoSpace (INSP)Lifeminders (LFMN)24/7 Media (TFSM)
10/20/0012/04/0010/10/00
“piece of junk”“POS” (piece of shit )“piece of shit ”
1-12-12-2
Source: Affidavit filed April 8, 2002, by Eliot Spitzer, Attorney General of the State of New York,in New York State Supreme Court.
Chapter 2 • Earnings Propaganda
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While sophisticated investors knew that Merrill’s “3” rating meant “sell,”Spitzer said, the general public did not.In one notable case, Merrill’s Internet analysts initiated coverage on Internet Capital Group, a client of the firm, with a 2–1 rating on August 30,1999. The stock reached $212 on December 22, 1999, then began a long descent. On October 5, 2000, with the stock at $12.38, Blodget predicted in ane-mail to another senior analyst that the ICGE “was going to $5.” The nextday, he wrote: “There really is no floor to the stock.” Even so, the rating remained 2–1. Despite Blodget’s pessimism, ICGE was on Merrill’s top 10 technology stocks list as late as September 12, 2002, Spitzer’s affidavit said.Laurel had questioned Blodget’s ratings in an August 6, 1999, columnfor Bloomberg that turned out to be her last for the company. The decision toend the column was doubtless based solely on the news judgment of herbosses and had nothing to do with Merrill’s 20 percent passive ownership inBloomberg.
Final NoteThe objection may be raised that we have failed to consider the questionof earnings disappointments, or changes in analysts’ earnings projections,or to compare the top-down predictions of the strategists with the bottom-upestimates of the spoon-fed analysts. Some might complain that we haveno black box to which we feed data from the last business cycle. Some sophisticated readers may even darkly hint that we have failed to consider thetens of thousands of academic articles that have tried to wrestle with thesequestions.Truth to tell, even the Spec Duo would find it taxing to review the bulk ofall this admirable knowledge. We reckon that it would take us two lifetimes toread the academic literature alone. We did read hundreds of articles. But the problem with many studies is that they used olddata, and arrived at formulas that were descriptive instead of predictive. For a theory to be testable, it mustoffer predictions. And it has not yet occurred to any financialacademic to investigate the effect of ever-changing cycles.Exhausted by our battles, fearing that we will still be receiving variationson the queries we have addressed here if we live to be 100, and eager to beabout our business, we can only retreat for a few happy hours to reread one ofour favorite Greek myths, the labors of Hercules, in preparation for our chapter on the legendary value investor Benjamin Graham.
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When Vic played racquet sports, he would first break down the opponent’s backhand. Then he would break down the opponent’s forehand. Next,he would hit some short shots that the opponent was not fast enough to reach.Finally, when the only way that the opponent could possibly compete was byleaning forward at all times, he would hit them deep. He prospered by gettinghis opponent to lean the wrong way at all times during his matches.If investors were to figure out that the market, by deluging them withspurious correlations about earnings and stock returns, is playing that kind ofgame against them, the broad flow of revenue to the market wouldbe reduced by 95 percent. The people who always buy at the highand sell at the low, who jump in and out of mutual funds at precisely the wrong time, would sit out the game. Of course, theymight hold too long or sell too quickly, and there might be some transfer ofwealth—but they would not overtrade, and they would be far better off. As itis, they call up their brokers and sell on earnings pessimism.But guess what? Tomorrow there will be earnings optimism, and they will have to do just the opposite.
3
THE HYDRA HEADS OFT E C H N I C A L A N A LY S I S
The Hydra haunted the unfathomable Lernaean swamp,the grave of many an incautious traveler.—Robert Graves, Greek Myths 1
I
n Greek mythology, the second task that the King of Mycenae demandedof Hercules was to kill the Hydra, a nine-headed monster whose poisonous breath killed everything nearby. Hercules went after the beast with hisclub, but as soon as he knocked off one head, two grew to replace it.Hercules had it easy. When we accidentally call up the menu of technical indicators on our Bloomberg monitor, we find not just nine, but dozensof colorful charts that we have concluded are poisonous to the investor: adjustable moving-average charts, regression lines, money flows, parabolicstops, Bollinger bands, various oscillators, pivots, relative strength, tradingenvelopes, stochastics (both bar and candle), point-and-figure charts, exponentially smoothed lines, advance-decline lines, TICK, TRIN, Fibonacci71
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retracement levels, and a software function that lets you draw straight linesbetween whichever peaks or troughs strike your fancy. This cornucopia of indicators does not begin to include all that are available. The Market Technicians Association—the “official spokes-organization for technical analysts inthe United States,” according to the group’s president, Ralph Acampora—lists 177 on its Web site.In 45 years of trading, Vic and his staff members have tested every indicator to which value is ascribed. So far, not one has passed the test. However, any important question deserves to be settled by putting “statistics onthe table.” Haphazard anecdotes, confident assertions, andappeals to authority—even, or especially, our own authority—will not do. We are always open to quantification andtesting of any rule.The problem with technical analysis is that practitioners and advocatesfail to follow standard scientific procedure in presenting and evaluating itstechniques. Scientific procedure in this case would include an exact definition of an event, a test of the accuracy and uncertainty of the predictionsbased on the event, a method for entering and exiting trades based on theevent, and a method for communicating and repeating the experiment sothat it can be verified and improved on. Practitioners of technical analysisoften object that it is an art, not a science, and cannot possibly be refuted.We agree. The propositions of technical analysis are simply nottestable, as visual interpretations are not susceptible of precise definition. Technical analysis is so rife with subjective interpretationsthat it must be regarded as more of a religion than a method, complete with priests who bewilder the unwashed at high-priced seminars. Because subjective interpretation does not permit the formulation of precisehypothesis or testable predictions, knowledge cannot advance.Take Martin “Buzzy” Schwartz’s explanation of the secret of markets:“When you look at the letter T, there’s an equal distance on the left side andthe right side of the T, hence the Magic T formula.” The investor is advised to“totally embrace” the Magic T by “drawing trend lines and charts, recalculating averages, figuring inflection points, setting entry and exit prices.”Schwartz offers this account of his success with the method: “The Magic Tand I became as one. Data ebbed and flowed in the most primal way, and Irose and fell with it instinctively, viscerally, like a mollusk in the sands of highfinance.”2 Would that we were all happy as clams. While Schwartz truly seemsdesirous of helping investors, we wish for more cerebral ways to separate themarket’s ebbs and the flows.
Chapter 3 • The Hydra Heads of Technical Analysis
73
Or, consider this majestically broad statement of Joseph Granville: “Themarket follows all the laws of physics, easily explained in terms of momentum,gravity, attraction, acceleration, harmonics, time, space, energy, magnetism,and even color as we deal with the entire spectrum of technical analysis weaving a tapestry of infinite beauty.”3 Sounds beautiful. But somehow, we doubtthat Granville’s “on-balance volume contributor,” which the guru claims tohave taken “to a new level of excellence,” or even the “climax indicator” or the“net field trend theory indicator” could justify his belief that any of them wouldcontinue to be as accurate as they were when he took “investors and traderscompletely out of the market” before the 1987 crash.Turning to the 775-page collection of interviews with all the great knightsand damsels in the technical analysis brotherhood, compiled by Jack Schwager, who can help being heartened by Schwager’s promise that charts reflectmarket behavior that is subject to certain repetitive patterns and that, with sufficient experience, some traders will uncover an innate ability to use chartssuccessfully as a method of anticipating price moves?As Schwager sums it up in his Trading Rule No. 4: “Find a chart patternthat says the timing is right—now. Don’t initiate a trade without such a confirming pattern.”4 (Occasionally, he says, you might consider a trade withoutsuch a pattern if there is a convergence of any measured moves, and support/resistance points at a given price area and there is a well-defined stoppoint that does not imply much risk.)It is enough to keep anybody awake at night wondering how to find suchpatterns, and how to measure the moves, and where those well-defined stoppoints might converge.But whenever we do formulate a technical pattern in a quantifiable way,test it, and discuss our findings, we find ourselves at the center of a great uproar, as followers of these and other indicators accuse us of failing to evaluatethe virtues of their chosen chart properly. So convinced are these critics oftheir indicator’s value that settling the question by putting any of their propositions to the test seems futile. The hydra is always ready with another head—a new technique, a new practitioner, a new market, a new source of pastdata—to replace discredited technical indicators.In the end, Hercules realized that the Hydra’s heads would stopgrowing only if he sealed off the source with fire. That is what we’re goingto do here. We are going to take the key theme commonto the hundreds of technical analysis techniques and test itwith fire. The theme in question is, “The trend is yourfriend.”
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Is the Trend Really Your Friend?For a representative sampling of the many variations of “The trend is yourfriend,” we turned to The Global-Investor Book of Investing Rules: Invaluable Advice from 150 Master Investors, edited by Philip Jenks and Stephen Eckett.5 Wefound that more than two dozen of the traders proffered “The trend is yourfriend” in various permutations. A few examples:• The trend is your friend in the last hour. (Alan Farley)• Never short-sell stocks when they are going up. (Simon Cawkwell)• Draw trend lines. (John Murphy)• Frequently, what is low will go even lower, and what is high will continue to rise. (Marc Faber)And our favorite:• The trend is your friend unless it is about to end. (Thomas DeMark)None of the writers of these trend rules backed them up with even a simple test. In fact, no test of “The trend is your friend” is possible, because therule is never put forward in the form of a testable hypothesis. Something is always slippery, subjective, or even mystical about the rule’s interpretation andexecution.Prescientific societies, needing a feeling of control over storms, naturaldisasters, predators, food sources, and other unpredictable vagaries of life,relied on myths and rituals for explanation and guidance. They sacrificedthe best part of their food to the gods, made costly pilgrimages to holyplaces, and showered gifts on priests, all to propitiate the gods who ruledtheir fortunes. By and large, these practices have died out as the efficacy ofthe scientific method became obvious. Yet, myth survives in the modernage, partly as a reaction against the rapid change that science has broughtabout. Even in the market alongside the most sophisticated mathematicalstrategies and cold-eyed calculations of veteran traders, myths can be foundthriving.But perhaps this is not so surprising. Modern investors, after all, findthemselves at the mercies of mysterious forces just as the cave dwellers did.The market is changeable, complex, and seemingly fathomless. Sharp risescan create great wealth and power. Sharp declines can lead to disaster anddeath. The market is sometimes as giving as a mother, sometimes as hostileas an angry ocean. It is no wonder that traders, faced always with the question “What should I do now?” long for a simple indicator to navigate the market’s mysteries.
Chapter 3 • The Hydra Heads of Technical Analysis
75
Reviewing many of the 378,000 references to “trend following” on our favorite search engine, Google, we found an abundance of sites featuring testimonials from satisfied students of such systems, as well as stories about trendfollowers who have achieved incredible riches. No wonder that a record 830aspiring chart-readers, the most ever, took the Market Technician Association’s annual competency exams on April 26, 2002, in Jupiter Beach, Florida.Who could resist the allure of a trend-following indicator that makes it “virtually impossible to miss a major market move,” as the Cabot Market Letter putit so tantalizingly in a spring 2002 edition?The advertisements of technical trading indicators available to the seekerfor a price are indeed enticing. Active Trader magazine’s Internet store, for example, offers a “groundbreaking primer,” Trading Classic Chart Patterns:This comprehensive guide includes easy-to-use performance tables supported bystatistical research. By using a simple scoring system, you’ll learn how to predictthe performance of a chart pattern almost by looking at it. The “Trading ClassicChart Patterns” section will serve as a handy reference guide for your favoritechart patterns, including broadening tops, head-and-shoulders, rectangles, triangles, and triple tops and bottoms. You’ll quickly learn about the Adam-and-Evecombinations of double tops and bottoms, and how to select the best performerswhile avoiding the losers. You’ll discover:• How to use the price trend leading to a chart pattern as a gauge of futureperformance.• How tall formations perform substantially better than short ones.• What a partial decline is and how to buy in early for a larger profit.This book is an invaluable resource that provides the obvious answer—Yes!—for every investor who has wondered if trading chart patterns can be profitable.6
Granted that some trend followers have achieved success. Doubtless theirintelligence and insights are superior to our own. But it is worthwhile to stepback and consider two fundamental questions:1. Is their central rule, “The trend is your friend,” valid?2. Might their reported results, good or bad, be best explained as due tochance?Our initial observation is that common sense argues against trend following. Take two points on a price chart, draw a straight line between them andextend that line. If the point later in time is above the first, the line slopes up.If the later point is below the first, the line slopes down. What does that show,except that a stock has been up or down?
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What strikes us as common sense, however, is notenough to settle the question. We tested the trend propositionas best we could by running numerous tests of our own devising. We also surveyed the extensive academic literature ontechnical analysis, and updated and tested others’ work. We report the resultsin this chapter.Numerous obstacles beset anyone who tries to test momentum-tradingtheories. The patterns themselves, as well as the studies purporting to showtheir efficacy, all suffer from a basic problem: Patterns are based on prospective events that had not taken place when the fish was supposedly caught. Thefish, in other words, is counted while still in the water.Two professors at Southern Methodist University, Venkat Eleswarapuand Marc Reinganum, illustrated some of the difficulties in studying momentum in a recent paper, “The Predictability of Aggregate Stock Market Returns: Evidence Based on Glamour Stocks.”7 The study concludes that thereturns of the market are negatively correlated with the returnsof glamour stocks in the previous 36 months. They find no evidence that value stocks predict future returns. The study usesdata from 1951 to 1997 and therefore does not take into account the regimeshift that has taken place in glamour stocks since 1997. The Nasdaq doubledfrom the end of 1997 to March 24, 2000, and tumbled 72 percent thereafterthrough July 2002. Such dragons require new powers of divination in thosewho would confront them. Moreover, the professors’ selective use of a groupof companies for which continuous earnings data were available on Compustat may well have resulted in the omission of some beasts and stocks pertinent to the results.
Testing for TrendsWe began our own tests by looking for trends from year to year. Using dataprovided by the authors of Triumph of the Optimists, which we consider thebest investment book ever written, we found that trends in annual returnshave been absent for the last 102 years. For consecutive years, the correlationis minus 0.02. (The correlation between the return in one year and the returntwo years later is minus 0.25—much better.) In recent years, the correlationshave been even more negative; three consecutive negative annual returns inthe S&P 500 were last seen in 1939–1941. (As we write, near the end of 2002,it looks like the market may complete a third down year, finally throwing thetrend followers a bone after their long privation.)
Chapter 3 • The Hydra Heads of Technical AnalysisTable 3.1
Up/Down Combinations
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3 Gain (%)
−−++
−+−+
1616139
77
As authors Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton point out inTriumph of the Optimists, there have been only six occasions in the past 102years when the market has declined for two years in a row; too few observations for reliable statistical conclusions. But the average return in the following year was 16 percent, a tie with the down-up combination (see Table 3.1).We have calculated the market’s return the next year after all four combinations of the previous four years’ returns.Furthermore, the correlation of market returns between past and futureyears for all relevant periods is negative, as shown in Table 3.2.Perhaps short-term trends in the averages support the trend-followingview? No, not there, either. Correlations between consecutive nonoverlappingperiods of various durations of less than one year in the most widely tradedstock futures are negative, showing what is called “mean reversion.” In otherwords, declines in the averages tend to be followed by rises and rises tend tobe followed by declines.The scatter plot in Figure 3.1 shows the correlation of consecutive 20-daymoves in the S&P 500 Index from July 1994 to May 2001 to be −0.053. Thedots cluster around the horizontal axis with little or no pattern, and a slightdown slope from top left to bottom right. The correlation for longer periods iseven more negative. After declines in the market over a 20-day period, the
Table 3.2 Annual Market Return CorrelationsNumber ofYears Back
Correlation withCurrent Year (%)
123456
−2−25−4−2−17−5
Practical SpeculationCurrent 20-Day Point Change in S&P 500
78
200
100
0
–100
–200–200
–1000100Previous 20-day Point Change in S&P 500
200
y = 3.4% – 1⁄200 (x)R2 = 0.2%
Figure 3.1 Correlation of Consecutive Price Changes in S&P 500 Futures forPeriods of 20 Days, July 1994–May 2001
total gain in the market over the next 20 days is some three S&P 500 points,corresponding to a change of approximately 0.3 percent. After a rise, the totalcorresponding move is a bit below 0.In general, a good ballpark estimate for short-term correlations of variousdurations is −0.15.We next asked if monthly changes in the Nasdaq tend to continue or toreverse, and whether they lead to changes in the S&P 500 Index. To find out,we ran many correlations between leads and lags in the price histories of thetwo indexes, such as correlating the preceding two months’ return, skipping amonth, and checking S&P 500 for various monthly leads and lags. We performed the same exercise with Nasdaq versus S&P 500 leads and lags.We looked at the scatter diagrams, we computed statistical tables, and weassembled tables of comovements and countermovements. All these teststend to answer the question of whether large moves in one series are accompanied by large moves in the same or opposite direction of the other series.After computing hundreds of correlations, we concluded that the only relation with statistical significance is that Nasdaq returns in one month tend tohave a moderate positive correlation of 10 percent with the returns in the nextmonth. This means that if the Nasdaq goes down 15 percent in one month,the best estimate is that it will fall 10 percent of 15 percent, or 1.5 percent, in
Current Month’s % Change in Nasdaq
Chapter 3 • The Hydra Heads of Technical Analysis
79
0.20.10.0–0.1–0.2–0.3–0.3
–0.2–0.10.00.1Previous Month’s % Change in Nasdaq
0.2
y = 0 + 1⁄10 (x)R2 = 1.3%
Figure 3.2 Nasdaq Monthly Performance as Indicator of Next-Month Returns.(Data are from year-end 1971, year of Nasdaq’s inception, through April 2002,a total of 370 monthly observations.)the next month. If it goes up 20 percent in one month, the best estimate isthat it will go up 10 percent of 20 percent, or 2 percent, in the next month.This can be seen in the scatter plot in Figure 3.2 as a slight uplifting of the lineof best fit from the bottom left to the top right.That does not reduce the uncertainty by much. In fact, the predictions reduce the squared error of forecasts by a mere 1 percent. Thus, while there issome evidence of momentum in the Nasdaq, it isn’t very useful. All the othercorrelations are random and consistent with chance. Considering the manycorrelations that we ran, there is a reasonable likelihood that the one significant correlation that we did come up with is the kind of chance result thatwould occur if we picked the winner of a heads-and-tails coin-tossing contest.
Streaks in SportsTaking a break from our scrutiny of indexes, we looked for insights on momentum in a completely different field: sports.In sports, casinos, and stocks, there is nothing like