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October 09, 2005
More conservative investing
On May 11, 1999, Granddad sent me a letter. It must've been soon after I told him we were moving to Lumbin, near Grenoble. Clinton was in the White House, and Granddad wasn't too impressed with him. He wrote:
And I can't understand the stock market either. Maybe it's because I don't understand companies like AOL and Yahoo. Yahoo sounds like you are whistling at a street walker.When I first bought stocks in 1956 I went to the broker's and studied financial records of several companies for a couple of days. Then I bought fractional lots of IBM, GM, AT&T and a couple of others. I added to them as I had money. I also bought a fund but sold it a few years later when I noticed the fund's stocks were not as good as I picked.
My aim was to have dividend income equal to the difference between retired pay and what I made on duty. And when a stock didn't pay dividends I sold it.
A while later other investors were deciding they didn't understand why AOL and Yahoo had such stratospheric prices, either. I had a bit of SUNW I'd bought with part of my salary, with the end result that somebody else got most of that part of my salary. Hope they spent it well.
Posted by Mark at October 9, 2005 03:25 PM
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