Boring Portfolio Report
Thursday, May 30, 1996

by Erik Rydholm (MF Fletch)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., May 30 -- Take a look at it, folks; the numbers don't lie. With 30 days down in May, the Boring Portfolio has gone precisely nowhere. The S&P 500 is up a healthy 2.68% for the month. The NASDAQ is zipping along, up 3.61% for May. But ol' Boring is still idling in the driveway, stuck in neutral.

Middling.

Neither here nor there.

Zzzzzzzzz.

One by one, a great procession of guest writers has paraded through the Boring Portfolio, lofting up grand nuggets of nothingness, pure parcels of piffle. Well you truly ain't seen nothing yet. The bleak fact is that Greg split town and left us with nothing to write about. I've scoured the wires. I've pored through the papers.

Man, these stocks are nothing if not Boring.

So with nothing to consider, nothing to debate, nothing to defend, I'm a real nowhere man. And I have something to say about that.

I used to produce a nightly television newscast in Chicago. Every night at 9pm, I was expected to get one full hour of news on the air -- whether or not there was a full hour of news to be had. On some nights, we had so much news that we had to run over our alotted time. But on no night did we ever cut the broadcast short, telling people that, goshdarnit, there was really nothing much to say about today, that all seemed well, that nothing much changed, and that it was a-okay to turn off the tube, hit the hay early, and dream sweet dreams.

Nope, on slow days, we did just the opposite. On slow days, we searched the streets for murder victims, rape cases, and drug busts. Someone fall into the lake and almost drown? Perfect. What about those window-cleaners who got stranded 30 stories up for an hour? Is the tape any good? Yes! Lightning victims, car accidents, train collisions -- line 'em up! On slow days, we scared the pants off the city of big shoulders. We made people feel edgy, nervous, sometimes sickened. We sold tragedy. We sold "nothing." Why did we do this? As it was occasionally intoned and generally understood, we had to get people to tune in every night. And no one was going to watch a show that was dull. And if no one watched, then you couldn't sell advertisements. And if you weren't selling ads, then there was no point to the news. News is business.

I did this for a few years, even defended it quite vehemently for a time. We got the ratings, and that meant people were watching, (even if they claimed in survey after survey to hate the stuff). The end result? Every night, I had to sell our nothing a little harder -- to make today's nothing seem a little more important than yesterday's. In short, I had to make something out of nothing. Ironically (and watch it here, 'cause I'm about to belt you with a double-negative), it got to the point where nothing didn't seem very important to me.

So I left the business and joined the Fool full-time. Here, the idea isn't to promote danger or disaster. The point here is to help. To lend a hand. To educate. To amuse. To make a few bucks. We didn't start this as a business; we began it as a mission. The business has grown around it. Will it survive a market crash? Who knows? Will a big media company squash us like a bug? Maybe. Increasingly, your response makes me doubt it.

For me, the best part of all of this is that on days where there's nothing to write about, I have the luxury of writing nothing at all. And that's something.

So, Fools: flip off the computer, hit the hay early, and dream sweet dreams.

Transmitted: 5/30/96