digging deeper into the finances of paperlinx, page-10

The excuses of "the economic environment" or "that's life in the paper business" are nonsense. Quite rightly, because he looks after your pension and mine and your Mum's, an institutional investor would react to such statements by ripping somebody's head off, and saying:

"I pay you $1million per annum to get a market-beating return. I don't want to hear about the economic environment or life in the paper business. They are your problem, not mine. THE WHOLE POINT of you running this business is that I have NOT invested in the whole economy or the whole paper sector; the whole point is that I am investing in a specific business and a specific management team in order NOT to invest in a general index and to do much better than the market or the sector - that's precisely what I am looking for and it's called capitalism. If you haven't understood that then you haven't understood what it means to be in a listed company and to be invested in by investors. Are you trying to tell me how to do my job? Are you telling me I should simply invest in a general index or in a portfolio across the whole sector? That's not going to get a market-beating return for my investors, they might as well stick their money in a bond with a fixed return, and your advice isn't going to get me star fund manager status either. If you can't figure out how to run the business profitably in spite of the economy or sector, and thereby make money for me and my investors, I will find someone else who can, and who really does want to earn $1m a year".

Actually he'd probably say that to them BEFORE ripping their head off, otherwise they'd never hear it, but you know what I mean.

We're getting towards that point here...