$100 ON THE SIDEWALK? Scrapple Face discovers a new form of soaking the rich. "Across the nation, the rich are coming forward with their painful stories. Tens of thousands of dollars wasted on shining rocks and glittering metals. Millions squandered on oversized homes, and underused private jets. And almost all of that money goes to middle and lower class workers." The post is probably intended to be funny, but it makes a serious point. And that serious point goes the other way in a couple of ways. First, the great commercial successes of the past 100 years or so have been those businesses that figured out improved ways of serving the middle and working classes. Sears, Ford, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, McDonald's come to mind. Second, one of my pet investing stories is what I call the English Countess's Charwoman Theory of Investing. Got it from an old version of How to Buy Stocks years ago. The countess, in the course of making small talk with her hired help, discovered what products they, and their neighbours, were buying, what entertainments were popular, what the children were eating. She did a little research, and bought the stocks of those companies, and increased the value of the estate.