Word: faired
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Which, it turns out, is a pretty fair description of how Merrill always viewed the market. Its ability to create wealth broadly was to him an undeniable proposition. And while this is now a more or less universal truth, it was not always so. During the first part of this century, after all, the Street was largely a rigged game. Insiders manipulated the market from behind the curtains, behavior that, while unseemly, was legal then. Small investors were scorned--or fleeced. Yet Merrill was untouched by the cynicism that pervaded Wall Street. Like so many American visionaries, he was marked...
...retrospect, Merrill Lynch was really Charlie Merrill's bully pulpit, the platform from which he could preach the virtues of the stock market and show the country that the small investor could get a fair shake on Wall Street. "Demystification had been the key to [my father's] great success," James Merrill later wrote in his memoir. "No more mumbo-jumbo from Harvard men in paneled rooms; let the stock market's workings henceforth be intelligible even to the small investor." To that end, the firm published an endless stream of reports, magazines, pamphlets--11 million pieces in 1955 alone...
...employees pushed Gates in this direction, but he was willing to go, and the industry followed. The Gates Road to Wealth is still a one-laner, and traffic is limited. But the idea that a successful corporation should enrich not merely its executives and big stockholders but also a fair number of ordinary line employees is (although not unique to Microsoft) potentially revolutionary. Wealth is good. Gates has created lots and has been willing to share...
...idea that Microsoft is fated to dominate technology forever. They had this same idea about IBM, once admired and feared nearly as much as Microsoft is today. They had essentially the same idea about Japan's technology sector back in the 1980s and early '90s. It isn't quite fair to compare Microsoft to a large country yet. But Japan was on a roll and looked invincible--once. (Or, if you go back to Pearl Harbor, twice...
Ling, an Oklahoma high school dropout, went into the electronics business in 1946 with a $3,000 stake. To finance his earliest acquisitions, he hired salesmen to peddle shares of Ling Electric Co. door to door in Dallas and even set up a booth at the Texas State Fair. Brokers laughed, but investors did well. "The genesis of our business was diversification," says Ling of his rapid expansion, which included everything from aircraft to baseball mitts...