Friday
From the Spectator:
If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth £4.95, with HBOS, earlier this week your £1000 would have been worth £16.50, £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than £5, but if you bought £1000 worth of Tennents Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium re-cycling plant, you would get £214. So based on the above statistics the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and re-cycle.
This is from two weeks ago, so adjust for the financial turmoil since... the advice still stands.
Er - nonsense.
£1000 of Tennents lager is about 500x500 ml cans - more or less.
Each can weighs about 15 grams, so 500 cans weigh 7500 grams or 7.5 kilograms. With aluminum can scrap fetching between £0.70 and £1.40 per kilogram in the UK (depending upon the state of the material), that's between £5.25 and £10.50-worth of aluminum scrap. The math in the US is similar - it's between $12 and $18-worth of aluminum.
No fact-checkers at The Spectator, then?
As another commenter at The Spectator has already noted, this is a rehash of a similarly-incorrect piece of netlore from severla years ago, only that one was denominated in dollars and referred to signal US market failures like Enron.
llater,
llamas
Posted by llamas at October 3, 2008 11:51 AM
Notwithstanding llamas' fact checking, one can't help feeling that the missing example is: "and if you had invested £1000 in home improvements, then agents of the state would have forced their way into your home to inspect it and then ass-raped you for extra taxes due to the added value".
Posted by the other rob at October 3, 2008 12:14 PM
Interestingly enough, I received the American version of this joke. The company names and beer were replaced with American counterparts (and currency was in US dollars).
Posted by naman at October 3, 2008 06:14 PM
Different versions of this joke were popular 6-7 years ago in the wake of the dotcom bubble and the Enron bust. Here in Canada, their favorite target was Nortel. Here you can find some concrete numbers, but I don't know how reliable they are:
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/b/beer-stocks.htm
Posted by Ivan at October 3, 2008 06:46 PM
I think there's a decimal point missing somewhere Adrianna, the cans would be worth something like £2, not £200.
Posted by Dave Birch at October 4, 2008 01:39 PM
Sheesh, people, it's a joke.
(Precisely accurate or not, the joke has always been a humorous comment in an equity-shorting environment.)
Posted by bobby b at October 6, 2008 12:06 AM
Of course, the joke was interesting and humorous. I do expect much more different versions. What do you think about the best current investment advice suggested?
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Julissa
Make Money
Posted by Julissa at December 20, 2008 11:00 AM
