Wednesday, April 15, 1998

Roscoe Rump
By Jacob Lewin ([email protected])

Dear Tom [Gardner],

I met you a few months ago when you were in Portland, OR on your book tour. I interviewed you at KINK-FM. I'm sure it changed your life. So I'd like to introduce you to someone who has changed my life... Roscoe Rump, chief investment strategist for Roswell/Rump.

Roscoe is a bit of an investment Mr. Malaprop. His notion that Teradyne was a restaurant chain, Read Rite was an educational tutoring company and Kulicke and Soffa was (you know) have gotten his followers into a bit of trouble. Not to mention his belief that Northwest Natural was the nation's first publicly traded nudist colony. The firm shelled out big for a Rump field trip to Northwest Natural. In case there were physical obstacles to getting into one of the sites, Rump hired an expensive consultant on scaleable architectures who he claimed could "climb a fence faster than wisteria."

Of course you could learn more about Roscoe by reading Litigation is Pending! The Highly Unauthorized Biography of Roscoe Rump! by Wall Street and Indian food insider, Laslo Biryani. Biryani learned that the young work-shy Rump's dream job had been to become portfolio manager of an index fund. Rump also has a family of newsletters. His Rump IPO Alert clued the market in to Applied Diuretics which came public just as Wall Street was giving a big premium to liquidity. Talk about upstream earnings potential! And lastly, there are the Rump Funds, for example his Rump Annual Report Fund, which uses proprietary software to pick stocks depending on when their annual reports come out so investors aren't knee-deep in 10-k's every April.

Every once in a while I come across a Rumpism that I think might be worth sharing with fellow investors. Stay tuned for more occasional bits of the Divine Roscoe?

Sincerely, Jacob Lewin

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