Page:Hints About Investments (1926).pdf/34

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adopted by directors of well-financed companies, and reinvest regularly part of this income that he receives, then he makes his holding, if he reinvests successfully, into a gilt-edged real-property investment, steadily expanding in earning power and value. But human nature being what it is, it is evidently much more difficult for the ordinary investor to carry out this policy for himself, faced as he always must be by manifold and clamorous reasons why any money that he receives should be spent, than to submit to the beneficent despotism of the directors who manage the finances of the companies in which he is interested, and reinvest for him, subject to his confirmation in general meeting which he is too wise or too lazy to withhold.

Why, then, it will naturally be asked, are not industrial companies more uniformly successful, and why is it that financial concerns such as insurance companies, banks and trust companies do not invest a much larger proportion of their funds in the ordinary shares of industrial enter prises which have been shown to have this probability of growth in income and in value on their side? And why should the investor whose ideal involves expansion of income and value in his investments, still be advised to seek the comparative safety granted by creditor-