Letters to Businesses.com

Dear Halliburton,

You are one smooth operator, I gotta hand it to you. When your CEO gets tapped to be the Vice President of the United States, you know your company is in for some good times! It was with dollar signs in his eyes that Mr. Cheney stepped down from CEO of Halliburton (with plenty of stock options) and stepped up to be the Vice President of the United States. We here on Wall Street had dollar signs in our eyes too.

The plan was so simple, so profitable, so diabolically lucrative. Cheney marches us into Iraq, and next thing you know, you’re awarded Billions and Billions of dollars worth of contracts. Halliburton, you dog. No one seemed to care too much whether or not we actually had a reason to go into Iraq, what with the trade centers recently blown up and all.

Weapons of Mass Destruction? Links to Al-Qaeda? Are these the reasons we went into Iraq? No! But one of those would do. And as the troops were ordered in, we all started buying Halliburton stock.

What we knew on Wall Street was that with your “Emergency Aid” contract with the government, you profited more and more with each emergency that occurred. In other words, you profited every time someone was shot… and killed. Follow me hear… all you had to do at that point to maximize your profit, was maximize the death toll…

Observe the Halliburton stock chart, over the course of the Iraq war.

See where it starts to go up around 7? The smart money bought there. With the ex CEO in the white house, and the country going to war, we were so excited to put our money down on Halliburton. A good lesson to all you newbie traders.
The smart money knew to simply play the death toll.

As long as this chart kept going up, we were buying buying buying. Our pattern becomes more transparent when you overly the stock chart with the death toll chart.

See, 20,000 fatalities meant the stock was still a buy at $20. 30,000 fatalities meant the stock was still a buy at $30. And then in 06 the contracts started to expire, and we long run was over.

But the smart money knew that Halliburton makes money every time someone gets killed in Iraq.

I want to thank you, Mr. Cheney, for buying me a new house. And a swimming pool. And a Ferrari.

The thing is, I really want a Gulf Stream IV personal jet. Mr. Cheney, I beg you, please get us into war with Iran. Hell I’ll even give you a commission off the millions I make. Think of it as payment for good will.

Godspeed Cheney. Godspeed.

Sincerely,

Wall Street

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