Monday, January 1, 1996

Future Fribbles
by Ted Verrill EsquireTed

A man I once worked with and considered a good friend found an old but ornate bottle while walking on the beach one sunny August week-end. He didn't want the dirty old bottle but he couldn't quite bring himself to throw it away.

"Maybe with a little spit and polish I can present it to my in-laws as a gift," he thought as he grumbled about their plans to stay for the entire week.

As he began to rub the sand and dirt off of the bottle, a great swirling form appeared out of the bottle. Realizing that he had found a bottle with a Genie, my old friend immediately demanded a wish for setting the Genie free. The Genie, a wise old chap, held a finger out and said in a great booming voice, "I shall grant you one wish - no more, no less, and no wishing for more wishes Mr. Smarty-Pants."

Well at that my friend, a market whiz, asked for a laptop complete with a cell-phone modem, and access to the  following Friday's "The Motley Fool Online." Instantly the Genie was gone and there in his place was a brand new laptop, fired up and displaying the main page of the following week's "The Motley Fool Online." Well my old friend sat down and began to hunt through The Motley Fool, learning more and more about the market's moves and news, and writing down a complete strategy for becoming a billionaire in a week. After spending hours and hours digging through the incredible wealth of information The Motley Fool offers, he discovered the "Special Announcements" screen.

There, to his horror, he came across an eerie obituary. The obituary was of a shooting star who had, from a position of relative obscurity, made a series of incredible trades over the course of the week and then dropped dead of a massive heart attack while celebrating his newly found riches over dirty-water dogs with chili and onions on the corner of Sixty-Third and Park.

Can you guess who this previously anonymous trader was?

Well my old friend had never heard of him either but the stranger's obituary scared my friend into exercising and eating right. Well I haven't seen nor heard from my friend since he bought his own island somewhere in the South Pacific, but I can tell you this: If you ever find a bottle on the beach and you rub it and a Genie comes out, please remember that I am quite partial to Single-Barrel Bourbon, Aged Cigars and that you saw it here first on Fool.com.