Tuesday, May 06, 2008

"To Strive Together"

It's been a busy few days of school, and it has prevented me from posting in nearly a week. Rest assured that a lot has been learned in that time, and there is a heavy backlog of ideas to write upon. (One great lesson which I'll expand on later: have a clear vision of how shareholder's will get a hold of profits. No more majority owned firms with dicey managements. Sure, they are cheaper, but that is rightfully so. Most of those managers would never like you to see that cash. And with a large block of shares, they can make sure it stays that way.)

Yet for now, a friend of mine told me something interesting today. The Latin root for competition, when translated, means "to strive together". Competition existed as a means of improving their skills and themselves. That meaning seems to get lost sometimes today, overshadowed by a focus on the winners or losers. But to me, the older definition is in the right. The outcome is not necessarily as important as what you take away from the process.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As an ABXA and MEG shareholder, I am with you on management quality. They have good investment value, questionable management notwithstanding, but I would rather hold high quality companies at fair prices while waiting for my Blue Chip Stamps.

Nnejad said...

Two companies which I've been looking into deeper and hope to talk about in detail soon. But at least in these investments, shareholders can devise some way of extracting most of the true value if they needed to. When dealing with majority-owned family companies, the maximization of value is sometimes overlooked by the owners. Instead, they may be focused on hoarding the wealth within the company to provide easy job security for their future generations.