Ten Insane Things We Believe On Wall Street

To outsiders, Wall Street is a manic, dangerous and ridiculous republic unto itself – a sort of bizarro world where nothing adds up and common sense is virtually inapplicable.

Consider the following insane things that we believe on Wall Street, that make no sense whatsoever in the real world:

1. Falling gas and home heating prices are a bad thing

2. Layoffs are great news, the more the better

3. Billionaires from Greenwich, CT can understand the customers of JC Penney, Olive Garden, K-Mart and Sears

4. A company is plagued by the fact that it holds over $100 billion in cash

5. Some companies have to earn a specific profit – to the penny – every quarter but others shouldn’t dare even think about profits

6. Wars, weather, fashion trends and elections can be reliably predicted

7. It’s reasonable for the value of a business to fluctuate by 5 to 10 percent within every eight hour period

8. It’s possible to guess the amount of people who will get or lose a job each month in a nation of 300 million

9. The person who leads a company is worth 400 times more than the average person who works there

10. A company selling 10 million cars a year is worth $50 billion, but another company selling 40,000 cars a year is worth $30 billion because its growing faster

Away from Wall Street, no one believes in any of this stuff. It’s inconceivable. On Wall Street, these are core tenets of our collective philosophy.

No wonder everyone else thinks we’re insane.

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I’m traveling this week and posting will be light. I hope you’ve enjoyed this classic post, which originally appeared here on October 23rd, 2014 – Josh