Mozart penned one of his greatest symphonies as a result of dire financial need – something he wouldn’t have had to if he would have humbled himself and admitted that someone he considered evil, Voltaire, had something to teach him when it came to wealth management.
I’ve watched in fascination over the past couple of years as German conglomerate Joh. A Benckiser has been quietly buying up the world’s leading coffee brands, acquiring Caribou Coffee for $340 million, Peet’s Coffee & Tea for $974 million, and my personal obsession, Douwe Egberts for $9.8 billion, among others. The firm is the personal holding company of…
As fate would have it, around the same time my family decided to start a week of Italian cooking two days ago, kicking it off with a remake of one our favorite Marcella Hazan recipes and vowing to go through more of her cookbooks, the legendary author had passed away in her Longboat Key, Florida home.…
Generally speaking, it’s a very bad idea to rely on Wall Street analysts to make decisions for you when it comes to your investment portfolio. Often, people who work on Wall Street display a strong bias toward overoptimism when it comes to future results, while neglecting the stable, boring companies at fair prices.
After I explained the BHP vs BBL shares for BHP Billiton, I realized I may as well dive into the complexity of the Royal Dutch Shell Class A vs Class B shares. I had originally avoided it when writing about the shares I picked up for the KRIP the other day, but there seems to…
With the discussion of me buying some shares of mining giant BHP Billiton the other day for the KRIP portfolio, there seems to be some confusion about the difference between BHP vs BBL, and how those are related to the BHP and BBL ADR listings on the New York Stock Exchange. This is one of…
In the past week, we’ve talked about the phenomenal success of an investor who bought shares of Walt Disney Productions (now called The Walt Disney Company), a decision that would have turned a 1,000 share position costing $13,880 into somewhere between $26,672,640 and $40,000,000 between 1957 and 2013. We even looked inside the secret family holding company, WED Enterprises, Walt Disney used to build his own family’s wealth and retain power. Most people don’t know that before those two firms, there was another that changed the direction of Walt Disney’s life. It did not enjoy a fairy tale ending but it did lay the foundation for the things that came much later.
After our discussion of The Walt Disney IPO earlier today, which was born out of Walt and his family consolidating three of the companies they owned underneath a single umbrella and issuing shares to the public to help finance the ever-expanding empire, including the creation of the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California, I thought it…
With the talk of investing in Walt Disney shares as part of my souvenir program during my weekend trip to Disneyland in California, I thought it would be fun to go back and do a case study of the Walt Disney IPO. I originally got the idea the last time we were in Walt Disney…
After lunch at Club 33 and a ride through the Haunted Mansion, we all decided to head over to Disney’s adjacent theme park, California Adventure. The moment we walked through the entrance I was greeted by one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. If you don’t know what you are seeing, you aren’t alone.…
