The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book On Value part 47. The purpose of this book is to supply, in a form suitable for laymen, guidance in the adoption and execution of an investment policy. Comparatively little will be said here about the technique of analyzing securities; attention will be paid chiefly to investment principles and investors’ attitudes. We shall, however, provide a number of condensed comparisons of specific securities - chiefly in pairs appearing side by side in the New York Stock Exchange list in order to bring home in concrete fashion the important elements involved in specific choices of common stocks | CHAPTER 18 A Comparison of Eight Pairs of Companies In this chapter we shall attempt a novel form of exposition. By selecting eight pairs of companies which appear next to each other or nearly so on the stock-exchange list we hope to bring home in a concrete and vivid manner some of the many varieties of character financial structure policies performance and vicissitudes of corporate enterprises and of the investment and speculative attitudes found on the financial scene in recent years. In each comparison we shall comment only on those aspects that have a special meaning and import. Pair I Real Estate Investment Trust stores offices factories etc. and Realty Equities Corp. of New York real estate investment general construction In this first comparison we depart from the alphabetical order used for the other pairs. It has a special significance for us since it seems to encapsulate on the one hand all that has been reasonable stable and generally good in the traditional methods of handling other people s money in contrast in the other company with the reckless expansion the financial legerdemain and the roller-coaster changes so often found in present-day corporate operations. The two enterprises have similar names and for many years they appeared side by side on the American Stock Exchange list. Their stock-ticker symbols REI and REC could easily have been confused. But one of them is a staid New England trust administered by three trustees with operations dating back nearly a century and with dividends paid continuously since 1889. It has kept throughout to the same type of prudent investments limiting 446 A Comparison of Eight Pairs of Companies 447 its expansion to a moderate rate and its debt to an easily manageable figure. The other is a typical New York-based sudden-growth venture which in eight years blew up its assets from million to 154 million and its debts in the same proportion which moved out from ordinary real-estate operations to a miscellany of
