I Want My Annual Reports

摘要

Christ opher Lahiji would probably be in the Guinness Book of World Records if it weren't for his mom. Last March, the 19-year-old stockpicker decided he would read the most recent annual report for every stock listed on Yahoo! Finance. By the time he finished the so-called Lahiji Project eight months later, 12,019 glossy bulletins were stacked in the garage and under the coffee table of his mother's living room. "My mom got really pissed about the level of trash," Lahiji says. "I was receiving five or six boxes of mail a day." So although he documented the project on video, he had to throw out all the physical evidence. Lahiji, a finance major at Santa Monica Community College in California, says he learned four valuable lessons from the project: There are thousands of tiny, undiscovered stocks. Companies will send you tons of free stuff if you show the slightest interest. European annual reports "whup the crap out of U.S. ones in design. And "women don't get turned on by guys who spend countless hours feeding themselves financial information."