Listen to Your Gut Element, If the Birds Are Okay, I'm Okay, Check the Label, Airing out a Trend

Listen to your gut element

Choosing successful stocks involves luck--and a little chemistry, finds William H. McCarroll of Lawrenceville, N.J. He writes that in 2001, while reviewing his stock holdings, he noticed that Boeing Corp. had the stock symbol BA. He wondered how many other companies had stock symbols that correspond to chemical elements.

An Internet search yielded 67 companies with a symbol that matched one of the first 103 elements. McCarroll then created a hypothetical "Elemental Fund" based on an equal dollar investment in each of these companies and calculated how the fund would have performed had he purchased it one year earlier. He found, surprisingly, that the fund had increased in value by 8.6%, while the S&P 500 had declined by 9.5%.

Since then, he has tracked the fund but not invested in it. The fund has risen in value by nearly 28% and continues to outperform the averages and most mutual funds, McCarroll says. While he acknowledges that the success of the fund may be a statistical anomaly, he notes that "most, but by no means all, companies with one- or two-letter stock symbols are likely to be old, well-established ones, and therefore the fund would be biased toward high-quality stocks."

So what does the future hold? "Not too long ago," McCarroll says, "Phillips Petroleum (symbol P) merged with Conoco Corp. to form Conoco-Phillips Corp. (symbol CoP), which suggests, dare I say it, the 'Compound Fund.' "

If the birds are okay, I'm okay

At least 30 Detroit-area residents have rejected their share of a $1.2 million class-action settlement from a 2001 chemical leak that forced them to evacuate their homes for several hours--not because they're unsatisfied with the amount, but because they don't believe they deserve the money.

To be eligible for the money, all that the residents had to do was sign a form saying they were home at the time of the leak, reports David Shepardson in the Feb. 4 Detroit News. Shepardson writes that resident Thelma Diemer said: "I look at it this way: Nothing happened to me, and when I left home the birds and squirrels with their tiny little lungs were fine, and when I got back, they were still fine. I didn't feel I was being honest accepting the money, and you have to think about the hereafter, especially when you're 86."

Check the label

Besides having similar names, the two drugs are available in the same dose strengths, have the same dosing interval, and are generally stored near each other on pharmacy shelves, according to a safety alert posted on FDA's website by Eli Lilly & Co., the maker of Zyprexa.

Lilly says it will change the labels on its 10-mg bottles of the medication to read ZyPREXA instead of ZYPREXA. The company is also launching an awareness campaign directed at pharmacists.

Airing out a trend

Christian A. Wamser of Camillus, N.Y., adds to our recent discussion about filling tires with nitrogen instead of air. An article in the Feb. 4 Syracuse Post-Standard points out that the savings are because nitrogen leaks out of tires at a much slower rate than air. Wamser says that that's hard to believe since the actual difference is quite small. He writes that more likely it's because of the slow interior loss of oxygen through absorption or oxidation of the tire surface interior.

Pass the pipette

Swiss kitchen product company Dalla Piazza offers an olive oil dispenser designed in the likeness of a laboratory flask and pipette. Use the pipette to drizzle oil "onto a plate of grilled vegetables or a fillet of poached sea bass," says Florence Fabricant in the Feb. 16 New York Times. But just remember: Don't pipette with your mouth.

This week's column was written by Linda Wang . Please send comments and suggestions to newscripts@acs.org.