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.…
How can people do this and live with themselves? This is the sort of thing that if I were running a company, I don’t care if we made millions of dollars a year in profit doing it, I’d shut it down. I believe it is immoral. Sure, it breaks no laws that I know of but it strikes me as ethically wrong. It is the reason we need stronger consumer protection laws in the United States. I believe it preys on the ignorant; the people who don’t know any better and who are trying to secure their future.
In honor of the new energy portfolio I’m setting up for my family, I thought I’d do a 25 year case study of an investment in Chevron common stock. The point is to illustrate how the biggest, most boring companies on the planet are not, in fact, so boring when you look at the remarkable…
The biggest mistakes are often not seizing the huge opportunities that are right in front of you. One of my least favorite stories of this economic tragedy involve a man named Ed Toman, who lived in Southern California back in the 1940s and 1950s and played an important role in the early days of the McDonald’s restaurant empire.
McDonald’s is one of those businesses that I love. The last time we talked about it was when I wrote the 25 Year Investment Case Study of McDonald’s, and showed how you could have turned $100,000 into anywhere between $1,839,033 and $5,547,089 depending on how you handled dividend reinvestment and the Chipotle split-off back in 2006, and the sorely lacking media coverage of McDonald’s results in February. No matter which way you look at it, despite periods of overvaluation and undervaluation, alternating with the underlying performance and the emotional moods of shareholders, McDonald’s has been a fantastic company. It makes its employees and shareholders a lot of money. It gives society something it wants, whether that be a plain salad with side of fresh fruit and a non-sweetened iced tea or a double cheeseburger with french fries and a Coca-Cola.
The developments on the income statement and balance sheet of Union Pacific between 2005 and 2013 are an excellent example of why it is important for you to analyze data yourself, and come to conclusions based on reasonable, rational, intelligently organized facts. The willingness to take action when others do not agree with you, and to have your action backed up by solid evidence, can make the difference between being comfortable and ending up rich. Two of the world’s wealthiest titans demonstrated this truth, not only when buying shares of Union Pacific, but other railroads, as well.
This McDonald’s case study looks at what a $100,000 investment in the restaurant’s common stock would have turned into over a 25 year holding period. It is one of my favorite investment research projects because there are four possible outcomes depending on how you behaved with your shares. It illustrates the importance of finding a…
A Case Study of Eastman Kodak How the Bankruptcy of One of America’s Oldest Blue Chip Stocks Would Have Turned Out for Long-Term Investors One year ago, Kodak declared bankruptcy after more than 130 years in business as a leading blue chip firm that gushed profits for its owners. I wrote Kodak’s demise at the…
