1. Fortune Brands (FO), the successor company to the American Tobacco Company.
2. Altria (MO), formerly The Phillip Morris Company, until recently the owner of Jell-O and Grape Nuts until they spun off Kraft Foods earlier this year
3. Kraft Foods, current owners of the Jell-O and Grape Nuts brands
4. GenCorp (GY) successor to the former General Tires
5. General Motors (GM), owner of the Chevrolet brand.
6. The British Tobacco Company (BTI, the US ADR for this UK company). Lucky Strikes currently belongs to this company.
What do they all have in common? Well, it's a little murky due to the sale of various brands and mergers, but they're all former sponsors of The Jack Benny Program.
Why do we care? There is some interesting evidence that an investment in these six companies can outperform the S&P 500.
Consider the 3, 5, and 10 year return. An equal investment in these companies would have yielded 12.0%, 9.7%, and 9.6% respectively. Not bad considering that the S&P 500 yielded 9.9%, 9.7%, and 5.0% over the same period. This beat the S&P in the 3 and 10 year period, and at worst matched the S&P 500 over the 5 year period. (The data is from Morningstar.)
It seems that Jack knew what he was doing!
There are some wrinkles - Altria spun off Kraft earlier this year, and so it doesn't have 10-year data (and the 3- and 5- year data is net of MO's results) so perhaps they can be omitted.
If you do so, then the return was 13.4%, 11.6%, and 9.6% over 3-, 5-, and 10-years. Several points over the S&P 500 in every case.
Lest you think this is a fluke, consider the "I have two shows" variant that consideres Colgate-Palmolive (sponsor of the Dennis Day Show), RCA Victor and Rexall (of the Phil Harris Alice Faye show).
Colgate Palmolive has done well over the years (9.4%, 5.9%, and 9.4%, only beating the S&P over 10 years). And of course Rexall is no more, the brand itself now owned by a multi level marketing company dealing in vitamins. The RCA-Victor label is owned by Sony (mostly underperforming at 10.6%, 1.6%, 0.9% over the same period) GE of course owns NBC (and used to own or sold off the non-record component of RCA victor) has done well but mostly underformed the S&P with 3-, 5-, and 10-year returns of 8.6%, 7.9%, 8.5% respectively.
The lesson here? Not much, except that Dennis should have listened to Jack and stuck with him (and his sponsors) instead of going after that second show. And Phil would have been better off investing in booze stocks (like FO) than has-been health titan Rexall.
I have WAY too much time on my hands.
