Professor Gressley recounts the escapades of domestic and international promoters in the history of the Salt Creek oil field, demonstrating that fraud and chicanery can play indispensable roles in the process of economic development.

Professor Hidy considers many recent contributions to business history and suggests some fruitful areas for future research.

Increasing emphasis on performance by the investment community has stimulated many innovations for accomplishing capital gains. Attention has been refocused on an established medium for this growth — investing in the new issue. Historically in and out of favor with security buyers, this particular type of investment has recently been enjoying unprecedented popularity.

In retrospect, writing about “risk and valuation” is somewhat akin to killing Hydra, the mythical, many-headed creature which would grow two heads whenever one was cut off. It is only fair to admit at the outset that I cannot lay claim to have slain the beast. As a matter of fact, by the time the reader finishes the article, he may have concluded that the beast has more heads than ever!

This article has two goals. The first is to contrast two widely used definitions of risk aversion. The second is to establish the feasibility of plunging behavior, in the sense that a possibly large number of risk averse investors will not be diversifiers.

This article examines some aspects of the portfolio selection problem when the “no-easy-money-condition” holds and the investor is constrained to stay solvent. The possible presence of a non-capital income is also taken into consideration.

Not all racetrack bettors want to handicap. Some prefer to buy expert opinion on the winners of each race and on the day's best bet. Investors are not very different. Many like to avoid the analysis required to choose among investment funds and so seek some summary measure that will rank funds relative to one another and indicate which one is the best bet. Two measures suggested in work by John Lintner [2], William Sharpe [6], Jack Treynor[7], and Henry Latané and Donald Tuttle [1] rank investment funds considering both return and risk. These measures not only can be taken to provide an indication of the best bet among investment fund managements but also offer a guide to building a portfolio.

Risk continues to be a widely discussed topic within the field of finance. Academicians add risk variables to their quantitative models, while financial practitioners include risk considerations in their qualitative deliberations. In both contexts, risk — together with some measure of profit or return — generally comprise a dual or composite criteria for investment decision-making purposes. Whereas the decisionmaking situation can be described as ex ante, this article deals with risk in an ex post context. In particular, it reports an investigation of alternative risk-return measures which are designed to rank and evaluate the ex post performance of investment portfolios. Section I reviews three composite measures of performance and examines their interrelationships. A fourth alternative measure is also suggested. In Section II, the measures are used to rank the portfolio performance of a sample of mutual funds. Some difficulties in making performance comparisons of these funds against the market are discussed in Section III. The final section briefly explores the implications of the study and suggests areas for subsequent research.