The financial successes in the automobile business, great as they are, have followed the inexorable law that the richest returns in all investments are the ground floor ones. The history of no big business demonstrates more clearly that the way to make money is to invest in new companies when they are offering the first authorized capitalization for investment subscription. Money-making opportunities for new investors are always greatest in enterprises whose development is ahead and in the future. If they have reached the stage where development is already producing great profits, the door is closed to the new investor, or else he must pay a premium to sit in such paying company. In the ground floor days of the Ford money-making machine, Miss Couzens “risked” $100 on Ford. That $100 produced $100,000 in cold cash. But it did so only because the inception of the Ford enterprise provided the opportunity. Having made its half a billion, or more, the Ford enterprise is no longer enterable on any basis that would give such returns for each dollar invested. When money is needed enterprise is willing to pay liberally for its use. When enterprise has all the money it wants, money’s value to it is less. This is the most natural law. It is a law that operates in other things besides money. “He that hath, needs not; he that hath not, wants.” The automobile industry illustrates graphically that when an enterprise develops to the point where it is well grounded and has reached a period of age and steady earning capacity, it is not new investors who may come in and gather the richest plums, but the old ones, those who helped to give it its start, who stood by it when the future was obscure, and the ultimate outcome not certain. There is probably no business that shows as many people in it now, who were in it at the start, as the automobile business. This applies to manufacturers, distributors and investors, and is, to a certain extent, due to the industry’s newness. The original Ford investors are practically all intact. It is the original investors who have reaped the reward of their courage in embarking in new enterprise, and who have shared in the division of the juicy melons the automobile companies have cut in the form of huge stock and other dividends. We need no better proof of the fact that ground floor investments promise the greatest returns on money invested than the financial history of the automobile. While quantity production and the co-operative spirit which led to standardization were the keystones in the structure of the present day automobile success, the history of the successful development of the automobile demonstrates another fact, which is a vital one in the realm of investment.