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Eating out with my pal Ernie, while always memorable, is not for the faint of heart. Ernie is in the seafood business, so he knows every chef from coast to coast worth paying a visit to - but he does not coddle picky eaters.
One time he took me to a place where I had to choose a fish out of a swimming pool in the middle of the restaurant floor and watch it get carted off, still thrashing in a net. A few minutes later my hapless friend returned as sashimi, so fresh it was all but quivering when it landed in front of me. (Good thing I'm the sort of gal who guts her own fish.)
And so when I got together with Ernie during my super brief (26-hour) visit to L.A. last week, I knew he'd have something intriguing in store. Sure enough, I soon found myself bellying up to a bar in Little Tokyo - a sushi bar, that is.
Once seated, we turned ourselves over to Mr. Hisaharu Kawabe of Toranoko, no questions asked. As a third generation Japanese American, I know to keep my mouth shut and eat what's presented to me, whether it be monkfish liver, a kelp shooter or a deep-fried shrimp carcass. No matter. The man is a genius and watching him whip out a blowtorch to cook pieces of toro tuna was just stunning.
While feasting on Mr. Kawabe's Scottish salmon sashimi in a jalapeno sauce, Ernie and I discussed the fish business and, in particular, some of its marketing challenges.
Consider, for example, the Patagonian toothfish. Does the thought of chowing down on a hunk of this beast start your mouth watering? Me neither, which is why they call it "Chilean sea bass" instead. Or how about a slab o' dogfish shark? Didn't think so. But dub it "filet of grayfish" and everyone's appetite miraculously returns.
The point is, we humanoids think in words; the labels we assign to things in our world - whether fish-related or investment-related - affect our perceptions. Two such mind-altering labels that are high on my list of investment jargon pet peeves are "growth" and "value," at least as applied to individual stocks.
Think I'm crazy? Ponder this: the folks at Russell carefully assign growth and value weights to companies, often with a Solomonesque split between the two, so that a stock can be 70% value and 30% growth (I still haven't figured that one out). These weights change every year in June when Russell rebalances its indices.
And while this year, for the first time, the growth and value indices will be rebalanced in a band in order to reduce the number of stocks that get abruptly shuffled from one index to the other, this annual reclassification ritual suggests more change (often significantly more) than is actually occurring beneath the surface.
