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Friday, 19th September 2008

How to make money out of turmoil

Michael Millar 2:41pm

This is the best financial advice I've heard all week:

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.
 

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Mark

October 2nd, 2008 3:58pm Report this comment

Here's what I found in my email archive from 2004:

If you had purchased $1000.00 of Nortel stock one year ago,it would now be worth $49.00.

With Enron, you would have $16.50 left of the original $1,000.00.

With WorldCom, you would have less than $5.00 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of Beer one year ago,drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling price, you would have $214.00.

Based on the above, current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

It's called the 401-Keg Plan.

Kit

October 3rd, 2008 11:20am Report this comment

Here is another version of this joke from yesterday:

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/10/today-humour-investment-advice.html

llamas

October 3rd, 2008 11:46am Report this comment

Er - nonsense.

£1000 of Tennents lager is about 500 500 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 (depending upon the state of the material), that's between £5.25 and £10.50-worth of aluminum scrap.

No fact-checkers at The Spectator, then?

llater,

llamas

Bumblebee001

October 16th, 2008 11:53pm Report this comment

Conclusion: they seem to pay more in the USA ($) than in the UK (£).

Doug Harris

October 18th, 2008 2:41pm Report this comment

It's a great thought, but the mathematics is out by one decimal place. The scenario would produce around £20 of return at the recycling centre.

Doug Harris
Environmental Consultant
Stockton-on-Tees

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