Give Your Business a Heart (Collection)

6. Investors: Reaping What FoEs Sow

Chris is an accomplished investment manager for one of the largest financial institutions in the U.S. For reasons that will be obvious, we can identify neither him nor the institution with further specificity. At a meeting convened in the fall of 2005 to discuss the establishment of an FoE investment fund, Chris said he had been following FoE Whole Foods Market for some time. “When each quarter’s reports come in I say to myself, ‘The PE [stock price to earnings per share] ratio can’t go any higher.’ But it always does.” At the time of the investment fund meeting, Whole Foods’ stock had gained 70 percent for the year. Who would have believed that a grocery company in perhaps the narrowest margin business of ...