Word: franked
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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CITIZEN WELLES by Frank Brady (Scribner's; $24.95). Anecdote and scholarship are nicely balanced in this biography of the late Orson Welles, whose roller- coaster career in stage, screen and radio covered the spectrum from classics to commercials...
...Frank, who writes his Prudent Speculator in Santa Monica, Calif., took a turn slowly, slowly in the wind when his portfolio of recommended stocks dropped 50% in 1987. He recovered with a 49% gain last year, but the crowd may string him up yet again. "People think too much about the market," he tells his audience, comfortable in the subtle distinction that what he thinks about roughly 14 hours a day is companies, not market fluctuations. He espouses the solid, old-fashioned idea of buying good companies cheap and sticking with them long-term, with the added fillip of using...
...Frank is about as far as you can get from a pinstripe, commission-driven Wall Street professional, which is probably why his readers like him. He is a former professor of philosophy, carelessly dressed, with watery blue eyes and a fleshy, houndlike face. He is still doing penance for his 1987 performance, having vowed not to smoke another cigar till the Dow Jones average tops 2722. He tends to dwell on his losses, even though he started out with $8,000 in 1977 and by taking his own advice has boosted it to $422,000. Charles Allmon, a rival newsletter...
...crowd picks through the offerings carefully, learning something about what makes Al Frank and Stan Weinstein and possibly also the market tick. They search for revealing new indicators or for an unknown face who has it all figured out (a hidden imam, in the jargon). They browse among new ideas, like one newsletter's espousal of the "butterfly effect," the chaos theory that a hurricane in the Caribbean may be caused by an unknown butterfly flapping its , wings six months earlier somewhere in Brazil, and that, by analogy, there are no hidden imams because it's all too complicated...
Gorbachev's feisty tone was matched by a barrage of frank criticism from the floor, which was later printed in full in the Soviet press. Yuri Solovyov, the Leningrad regional party boss who had lost his uncontested election race for the new legislature, charged that Kremlin initiatives like the antialcoholism campaign and the program to foster cooperative businesses had been carried out with "inconsistency, haste and insufficient thought." Of perestroika, Solovyov said, the "minuses still significantly exceed the pluses." Moscow Mayor Valeri Saikin, another election loser, questioned whether democracy had not come to mean "everything is permitted...