Sublime

Each quarter we try to study an admirable company and discuss it with our Operating Group managers and board members. We focus on high performance conglomerates that have demonstrated at least a decade of superior shareholder returns.

The Graham-and-Dodd investor saw a stock as a share of a business, whose value, over time, would correspond to that of the entire enterprise. It is an almost unbelievable fact that Wall Street never asks, “How much is the business selling for?”

Ramsey Beirne pitch to take on a search assignment, say he would consider it, then disappear for a few days before returning with an answer. The CEO’s of these small companies were consulting someone else, and that someone else, upon investigation, turned out to be the venture capitalist who sat on the company’s board of directors.

Look at the biographies of the board, which are also in the proxy statement. If many of them are closely related to top management—or are former managers themselves, it’s a good bet the board isn’t going to be as hard-nosed when questioning management’s actions as it could be.

The clear impression is that prosecutors had trawled through years of tariff filings searching for possible Standard violations, however technical. In short, it looks like harassment—an impression that is reinforced by the government’s request on retrial, after the case was thrown out on appeal, to present a separate evidential argument for each of