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.
Aaron and I were sitting in a sandwich shop trying to flavors in the new Coca-Cola Freestyle machine, when I began to wonder what it would take to build a $250,000 stake in a company like Coke by the time a person reached 35 years old. It was a fun academic thought experiment.
Before you invest a single penny of your money into a potential stock, bond, project, or other asset, there are two questions you should ask yourself. These two questions could have saved a lot of investors from asset bubbles and bankruptcy court. #1 – Does the Investment Offer an Adequate Rate of Return All Things…
I’ve made no secret of the fact I’ve been a net purchaser of Berkshire Hathaway shares for the past year. The valuation seemed (and still seems) absurdly low relative to intrinsic value. Apparently, the Berkshire Hathaway Board of Directors and management agrees.1 The company is now looking at itself as the best use of the firm’s cash.
After breakfast this morning at the Animal Kingdom lodge, we headed over to Downtown Disney. As we shopped for souvenirs before flying back to Kansas City tomorrow, I was in the enormous World of Disney store when I realized the best possible souvenir I could have would be ownership in the business. From the kitchen section, surrounded by Mickey Mouse spatulas and Minnie Mouse oven mitts, I took out my phone, remotely logged into one of my personal brokerage accounts, and purchased a small memento in the form of 100 shares of The Walt Disney Company at $33.04 per share.
One of the things that helped me build wealth early in my career is the realization that there is no “stock market”. Instead, there are individual businesses and individual investors who own those businesses. From time to time, a business owner may want to increase or decrease his ownership in a company so he approaches…
In recent days, I have been immersing myself in the annual reports and other filings of a company called Brown-Forman. The company, which manufactures Jack Daniel’s whiskey, Chambord vodka, Korbel Champagnes, and other brands of spirits, is still controlled by the family that has owned it for more than a century, with two classes of stock trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
I am working on my What is a mutual fund? category at About.com and a thought struck me. I wanted to go back and look at the most recent investing lifetime (the 50 year period between 1960 and 2010). I imagined that an investor could have bought the S&P 500 stock market index (obviously you can’t…
The media is making a big deal out of the recent stock market drops, acting as if we were living through some sort of new paradigm where stock collapses are unheard of and Wall Street rips off small investors. The past 200 years have been a fantastic time to be a long-term value investor despite some…
I write a lot about investing in stock and investing in bonds over at Investing for Beginners at About.com, a division of The New York Times. There is a reason I tend to be far more favorable to equity investments (stocks) than fixed income investments (bonds) when it comes to long-term investing and why much…
After writing about the 20 year performance of Colgate-Palmolive stock, my Aunt Donna asked me about Dawn dish soap, which is owned by Procter & Gamble. I broke out the historical dividend charts and went to work to create a comparison of how an investor would have fared had they parked money in P&G twenty…
