"전설로 떠나는 월가의 영웅" 원서로 공부하기 39편

* 전설적인 펀드 매니저 피터 린치의 "전설로 떠나는 월가의 영웅" 원서를 통해 투자공부와 영어공부, 두 마리 토끼를 모두 잡기 위한 컨텐츠입니다.

* 원서 제목은 "One up on wall street" 입니다.

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오늘은 8장입니다. 8장 The Perfect Stock, What a Deal!

 

# At last count the company owned 461 funeral parlors, 121 cemeteries, 76
flower shops, 21 funeral product-and-supply manufacturing centers, and 3 casket
distribution centers, so they’re vertically integrated. They broke into the big-time
when they buried Howard Hughes.

 

☞ At last : used for saying that something you have been waiting for finally happens

I’m so glad to meet you at last.

Then – at long last – their wedding day finally arrived.

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# They also pioneered the pre-need policy, a layaway plan that’s been very
popular. It enables you to pay off your funeral service and your casket right now
while you can still afford it, so your family won’t have to pay for it later. Even if
the cost has tripled by the time you require a funeral service, you’re locked in at
the old prices. This is a great deal for the family of the deceased, and an even
greater deal for the company.

 

☞ layaway: a system of paying for goods in small amounts and receiving the goods after the full amount has been paid, or goods bought in this way:

Could I buy/put the dress on layaway?

☞ pay off :  to give someone all the money that you have borrowed from them to buy something

Only another six months and the house will be paid off.

☞ casket : a coffin for a dead body

 

☞ coffin : a long box in which a dead person is buried

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# SCI gets the money from its pre-need sales right away, and the cash just keeps
on compounding. If they sell $50 million worth of these policies each year, it
will add up to billions by the time they’ve had all the funerals. Lately they’ve
gone beyond their own operations to offer the pre-need policies to other funeral
homes. Over the past five years the sales of prearranged funerals have been
climbing at 40 percent a year.

 

☞ pre-need : : occurring before there is a needespecially : planned prior to deathpreneed funeral arrangementspreneed contracts/insurancePre-need funeral insurance is whole life insurance that provides funds to pay for the insured's funeral and burial.

 

☞ Once in a while : sometimes, but not very often

I still see Ken once in a while.

Make sure you take a break every once in a while.

☞  top off : to finish something with a final activity or detail

top something off with something: We topped off the evening with a carriage ride.

☞ retrieve : to get something back, especially something that is not easy to find

She stooped to retrieve the key from the ground.

rescue efforts to retrieve the bodies of the victims

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# The best thing about this company is that it was shunned by most
professional investors for years. Despite an incredible record, the SCI executives
had to go out on cavalcades to beg people to listen to their story. That meant
that amateurs in the know could buy stock in a proven winner with a record of
solid growth in earnings, and at much lower prices than they’d have to pay for a
hot stock in a popular industry. Here was the perfect opportunity—everything
was working, you could see it happening, the earnings kept increasing, there was
rapid growth with almost no debt—and Wall Street turned the other way.

 

☞ shun : to deliberately avoid a person, place, or activity

She lives alone, shunned by society.

They shun all forms of luxury.

☞ cavalcade : a line of people, walking, on horses, or in vehicles, who are moving slowly as part of a ceremony

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# Only in 1986 did SCI develop a big following among the institutions, who
now own over 50 percent of the shares, and more analysts started covering the
company. Predictably the stock was a twentybagger before SCI got Wall Street’s
full attention, but since then it has greatly underperformed the market. In
addition to the burdens of high institutional ownership and broad coverage by
brokers, the company has been hurt in the last few years by entering the casket
business through two acquisitions that have not contributed to profits. Also, the
price of buying quality funeral homes and cemeteries has risen sharply, and the
growth in pre-need insurance has been less than expected.

 

☞ Predictable : if something is predictable, it happens in the way that you would expect

Most of the films we’ve reviewed this summer have had one thing in common – predictable plots.

The results of most of the studies have been predictable.