Investors wild about red

Investors get more impatient all the time. They dump a stock if the company's profit rises 40% instead of the previous quarter's 50%. But this creates a mystery: Why do these same folks continue to pay good money for the shares of cable-television, wireless-phone and entertainment companies that lose money year after year, with little or no black ink in sight? Comcast, the third-largest cable television provider in the US, is a prime case. Its day-to-day business has been forever unprofitable. Yet in the past five years, Comcast shares have easily outpaced indexes for the broad stock mar...