Sep

28

Both my grandfathers bought Exxon in some distant time. As my mother is fond of reminding me — it paid for her and my father's parents' retirement, funded some of my parents' endeavors (house, cars, etc.), paid for college for three children, (sadly) enabled her divorce, is now funding her and my father's (separate) retirements, and now is partially in the portfolios of the grandkids', where, presumably, it will be used to further fund great-grandchildrens' education, a retirement or two, etc. Exxon has been very good to my family on both the maternal and paternal side. A colleague tells me about how Disney stock has been very good to her family.

Buy and hold has been a very good thing indeed for me and mine. I hope I will have opportunity to gift my SBUX to a future generation as well. And before some spec comments — regardless of where it has been this year or last year or even 5 years ago, it is still way higher than what it was bought for and it has split several times (I stopped counting at the 3rd split, I think it was). Stocks may not progress in a straight line up but the line is clearly up over time.

That said, we will refrain from making much mention of the Bethlehem Steel stock in the family portfolio, though I imagine Exxon gains substantially outstrip the BS losses. I think.

Vic comments:

As the Abelprecbifurcflecprudents would say, there is little employment in Bethlehem right now, and many unused warehouses and railroad sidings.

J. T. Holley adds:

Yeah, and those Woolworth employees and their shelves seem very empty as well, not that there are umpteen million times more people shopping at Wallymart than ever shopped at the ole' Wooly.

Not to worry about the railroad sidings either, their foundations are put to good use across most of the U.S. through the Rails to Trails program. At least the labor that produced those tracks didn't die in vain!

Tom Larsen mentions:

Here is a buy and hold story that I think comes from a book edited by Charles Ellis called Classics: An Investor's Anthology

A money manager was called by a client's widow, who asked to meet with him about some stocks she had found in her husband's safety deposit box. When he examined the certificates, he came to the realization that the deceased had a financial secret. The money manager realized that each time he had bought a new stock in his client's managed account, the client had bought some more stock elsewhere and had it delivered out to be put in his safety deposit box. He had done this for many years. Many of the stocks were issues the manager had sold periodically for all of the usual good reasons, but that the client had put away permanently. The manager was amazed at the value of many of the individual issues in the box that he had sold over the years for small profits. So the manager was a good stock picker, but the client was a good stock holder.


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  1. Alexis McGee on November 14, 2008 3:27 am

    I dont know where Realty Trac is getting today’s numbers but they are down, down, down month over month and only a 25% increase november to november… the rest of the year has been 100%.

    These recent foreclosure numbers, plus the National Association of Realtors Existing Home Sales and Pending Home Sales reports for the last two months show that housing markets may be stabilizing. You can’t call a bottom with two months of data, but we are absolutely headed in the right direction,

    There definitely are a lot of ways to see this… I see opportunity.

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