I’m not sure who coined the phrase “Romance Stock.” It might have been my father; it might have been someone earlier. In any event, it’s a phrase we’ve long found useful at Cabot, because it provides a model that helps us understand how stocks behave. To understand the model, you’ve first got to understand that what makes stocks move isn’t revenues or earnings or anything you can measure. It’s simply the change in investors’ perception of the future. If investors as a whole are revising their opinion of a company’s prospects upward, then the stock will tend to rise. ...