young, gifted, and rich

May 19, 2003 2:14 AM

I, like, pick good stocks. Chris Lahiji, the 19 year-old "LeBron James of Wall Street", spent his summer analyzing the annual reports from thousands of companies. He then put together the semi-experimental Lahiji Tiny Fund with a lofty long term goal: Ideally, I wish for my analysis to one day be synonymous with the entire micro-cap segment (really small companies). This group of stocks, composed entirely of smaller companies, is up an impressive 80.78% as of 4/15. Lahiji's site also documents the impressive amount of crap [and QT video] that he received from companies as a result of requesting 12,000 annual reports. He spoke with Wall Street Week's Geoff Colvin on Friday.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly (11 comments total)

And his favourite stock is a Arotech, who are getting phat contracts from the Homeland Security Dept. Kid knows where the money's flowing thats for sure...
posted by PenDevil at 4:43 AM on May 19, 2003

Awesome. Did anyone else have the same twisted 100% profit idea as I did?

1. Request 12,000 annual reports.
2. Ebay the schwag.
3. Profit!
posted by VulcanMike at 7:53 AM on May 19, 2003

Hmm. The next Ryan Jacob, maybe?

Yeah, skip college, bud. Because what worked yesterday will definitely work tomorrow.

And good luck with the mutual fund? You can't buy more than 5% of a company's shares, and when the run of redemptions hits, you can sit back and watch, as the sell pressure just decimates your holdings.
posted by trharlan at 8:14 AM on May 19, 2003

That Adam Sandler's a funny guy.
posted by moonbiter at 8:18 AM on May 19, 2003

This group of stocks, composed entirely of smaller companies, is up an impressive 80.78% as of 4/15.

One month? Whoopee. Let's see where they are in five years or more.
posted by DakotaPaul at 9:06 AM on May 19, 2003

can you get annual reports for free?
posted by the aloha at 9:09 AM on May 19, 2003

In high school, I was bored one week in summer, so I went through an 800-number directory and called every company in it, asking for a catalog or investing information. They probably still get 10 pounds a day of junkmail in my name at the address after 20 years =p
posted by nomisxid at 9:13 AM on May 19, 2003

12,000 annual reports
x 15 minutes of reading (I'm guessing here)
---------------------------------
180,000 minutes
or 3000 hours
or 375 days @ 8/hrs a day (no holidays, no weekends off)

He either didn't spending anywhere close to 15 minutes per report, or he's lying.

I wouldn't buy stock based on someone who spent so little time evaluating a company, I certainly wouldn't buy stock based on a kid who was lying.
posted by Bonzai at 3:04 PM on May 19, 2003

I want to know if there is a simple way to request an annual report, plus random freebies, minus the annual report.

That SWAGfest is like the Career Day events they had at WPI, but up by a few orders of magnitude.
posted by cortex at 3:41 PM on May 19, 2003

A) His fund is hypothetical, focuses on penny stocks, and only takes in one month as DakotaPaul noted. How is the results impressive then?

B)Bonzai points out that its pretty much impossible for the kid's claims to actually be truthful.

Combine this two and add some unwarrented hype, and you have the next Blodgett, leading finacially uneducated trusting people to a land of no retirement funds.
posted by Darke at 10:09 PM on May 19, 2003

I wouldn't buy stock based on someone who spent so little time evaluating a company, I certainly wouldn't buy stock based on a kid who was lying.

In the kid's defense, he had some pretty rigid criteria about a company having cash on hand and a specific market-cap level, so a lot of them got chucked out faster.

On the other hand, when he was on Wall Street Week, he came off as a pimply (stoner?) kid who was wierdly obsessed with stocks, which makes it less about his fund (if you'll take investment advice from a 19 year-old with no formal training, then I've got a paramilitary force in Sri Lanka you should join), and more about hilarity.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 11:18 PM on May 19, 2003