Investing is the process of putting aside money today in exchange for more money in the future. This process involves risk but, when well managed, can help grow your wealth over time due to the power of compounding. This is the investing archive that includes articles published on JoshuaKennon.com. If you are looking for more great content, visit Joshua’s Investing for Beginners site at About.com, a division of The New York Times.
I have talked to you about ways to you can use trust funds to build wealth, and even talked to you about some of the interesting trust funds we saw in college. I recently encountered a young man who, upon turning 18 this year, found himself with a trust fund. The fund contains between $1,500,000…
Last week, I posted on a 50-year investment history of shares of The Coca-Cola Company. As I was publishing this month’s About.com content, I began writing a piece that I called The Dividend Dilemma that focused on whether you should reinvest your dividends or not. Around the same time, one of the readers, Matt Nix,…
I’ve spent a big part of today doing investment research on synthetic gemstones vs natural gemstones. Following the recent reading foray into the world of jewelry retailing, distributing, and mining, I kept coming across a company called Chatham. They had reportedly perfected the art of manufacturing gemstones such as rubies and sapphires inside of a…
To understand home foreclosures, you need to understand how bank mortgages are structured. Once you do, it will be easier to see how I view the problem of dealing with losing a home because you will see there is no “bank”, there is only a conduit through which depositors – waitresses, business owners, factory workers,…
It’s a fairly consistent thing that I get messages asking about the morality or ethics of investing in a certain type of company. Right now, there is a mail bag response I’m working on that deals with this topic. We’ve also talked about the fact that the Bri Institute thinks Jesus hates my portfolio. Though,…
Shortly after World War I, Raymond Poincaré, the Prime Minister of France, decided against partnering with Royal Dutch Shell to fund the energy needs of the French people. One of his military commanders, Colonel Ernest Mercier, worked with 90 banks and businesses to establish a new oil company called French Petroleum Company (er, technically, Française des Pétroles Compagnie since they weren’t speaking English). The name might sound prosaic but keep in mind this was the era of “General Electric” and “Standard Oil”. The new undertaking began operations on March 28th, 1924. Today, that business is known as Total, S.A. and it is one of the six supermajor oil powers on the planet.
Taking advantage of the right stock matching and retirement investing benefits, it would be possible to almost instantly double your money due to company matches if you and your spouse worked for a company such as Wal-Mart Stores.
Here are some words of wisdom I came across about portfolio management and building wealth from billionaire Charlie Munger. We’ve really made the money out of high-quality businesses. In some cases, we bought the whole business. And in some cases, we just bought a big block of stock. But when you analyze what happened, the…
In 1936, Parker Brothers released an add-on to the popular Monopoly board game called the Stock Exchange. Although the core Monopoly game had two asset classes – real estate and a few common stocks in the form of the four railroads and two utility companies – the Stock Exchange add-on brought the experience to a…
I am reading the Wells Fargo & Company annual report again for the fourth time this year, as well as conference call transcripts, analysts reports, and a host of other documentation. I’ve been looking at making some additional purchases of Wells Fargo & Company for the long-term holdings through some of my personal retirement trusts and plans, including the only one I discuss on the site, the KRIP portfolio, because I’m convinced the “new” bank, which includes the acquisition of Wachovia during the Great Recession and financial meltdown that doubled the size of the “old” bank, is significantly undervalued.
