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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…