There are all kinds of services created to meet the needs of other businesses and many of them are good investments. This historical piece offers some intriguing insight into past success stories that might help you decide if service businesses are a good investment today.

Manpower, Inc., is now the world’s leading temporary-help service organization, serving 66,000 employers including 98 of the 100 largest corporations. This subsidiary could, in time, rival the parent company in revenues.

The market is always in the habit of overbuying stocks of favored industries or overselling “deflated industries.”

Actually, deflated industries are often just in the “down” cycle of the whole economy, especially when they are plagued by excess capacity. Earnings of the nation’s basic industries have experienced periodic ups and downs in line with general economy. Those stocks whose earnings tend to rise and fall with the ups and downs of the economy are identified as cyclical stocks.

The new automatic vending device removes the ceiling of 99 cents which formerly limited the use of automatic vending machines. This new paper currency changer can be used in every merchandising situation which involves portable merchandise. Even the less romantic segments of the vending machine business are fertile fields for growth.

Defense will always have a future in American investments, but is there any money to be made in aircraft and aerospace investments? A sharp earnings rebound seems in prospect for plane manufacturers.

Meanwhile, Grumman’s work in the missile and space fields is increasing. Like Grumman, most aircraft companies are rapidly stepping into aerospace, of course, with different speed and emphasis.

While the computer market is large, the market for its related equipment is even larger. An exciting brand of accessory equipment is the thin-film memory field which appears to represent a climax for stored-program computers. A stored-program computer is an electronic computer with an internal storage system processing an entire program rather than individual bits of information.

Some were deficient in their failure to reveal the method of computation of profits or losses upon sales of securities (i.e. whether based upon average cost; first-in, first-out; or on the identified security basis). Similarly, inadequate analyses of surplus accounts in published reports led to the concealment of substantial realized losses.

Bonds or debentures and preferred stocks are the instruments that provide leverage. So strong was the feeling against leverage that the issuance of senior securities by open-end investment companies was forbidden in the Investment Company Act, although bank loans might be contracted.

Imply a percentage return on the investment in the shares of investment companies, except when the rate of return is expressed as a ratio of dividends paid from net investment income and adjustment has been made for capital gains distributions.

Perhaps oddly, general “feelings” surrounding the stock market, such as positivism and pessimism, tend to have a measurable effect on the value of stocks. A general peculiarity is that, in the past, the discount at which closed-end-company shares sold has generally been larger at low levels of the stock market.

The essence of such plans is that the investment pool shall at all times consist of two portionsemdash a defensive pool consisting of securities having relatively small price fluctuations (high-grade bonds and preferred stocks) and an aggressive pool made up of securities having considerable price volatility (mainly common stocks). As security prices rise, the defensive portion of the pool is to be enlarged relative to the aggressive segment.