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.
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…
I’m still running several weeks behind but one of the things I’ve been working on is a response to a few of the questions submitted by FratMan, whom you’ve seen in some of the mail bag sections I believe. He’s mentioned a few times, such as in the comments sections here and here, that he likes…
A Look At How the Father of Value Investing Calculated the Intrinsic Value of an Ordinary Share of Common Stock Benjamin Graham, the rich investor, professor, and mentor to Warren Buffett, once proposed a quick back-of-the-envelope intrinsic value formula for investors to determine if their stocks were at least somewhat rationally priced. He encouraged investors…
Using Wal-Mart Stores as an Example of Earnings Yields vs. Treasury Bond Yields I was up until 5 a.m. this morning reading through the past few years’ of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. annual reports, filings with the SEC, analyst reports, transcripts, and other documents. It is about time to have the businesses make another contribution to…
Berkshire Hathaway shares are now trading at around the lowest valuation relative to earnings and assets that they have since the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s. How is that possible? As the famed holding company of Warren Buffett has added businesses such as Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the stock price has treaded water so each dollar invested at today’s price represents more profit and equity than it did in the past.
I am convinced that the Series I savings bond program remains one of the most underrated investments for the average American in history. So much so that I wrote tens of thousands of words on the topic over at my the Investing for Beginners site. But tonight, I was writing a new piece of content…
