If you like glamour stocks, picking apart their financial statements can be sobering. Gimmicks using such things as pension assumptions and employee option plans may hide some real problems Remember the nifty fifty? These were Wall Street's darlings in the early 1970s. Companies such as Eastman Kodak and Xerox traded at 40 or more times earnings when the broad market had a multiple of 15. High earnings growth rates supposedly justified their sky-high price/earnings ratios. Alas, many of the Fifty turned out to be not so nifty. Competition and recession killed their margins.
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