staying invested

[corn18]

One of my stocks has been doing poorly and is 'on sale', so I used up all my investing money that has been waiting for an investment and got some more shares. It is a large company that I expect to eventually recover over the years, not some place that makes pet rocks.

GE...?

[Gailete]

GE...?

How did you guess? We have one of the big factories in the nearby city. Our rental property, is a house that they built about 100 years ago for employees. While they have had layoffs and such, I haven't heard of they closing down our plant and I know they are working on restructuring the business.

Since I started buying it, I have followed the dividends and at the beginning I could have only bought a partial share with the dividend reinvestment. My dividends this past year could have bought more than a couple of shares of the stock. I was willing to take a chance because I know once it goes back up, I will kick myself if I hadn't. Of course, if it crashes and burns then I know I made the wrong choice. If I wasn't willing to take that chance, I shouldn't have put a penny into stocks. Some I'm sure, who go by the buy high, sell low philosophy are dumping what they can. To be it is no different than stuff on sale at the grocery store. Granted I buy and sell in much smaller quantities than others here, but I have been happy with how things are going.

[Singuy]

Ha, I was going to guess GE as well.

Right now I think we have less than 1% of our net worth in cash. We actually don't even have an EF now that I think about it. Everything is invested.

[Gailete]

As the stock market tries to get back to where it was, my newest shares have gone up 21 cents apiece.

When I was in 8th grade, I got to take as one of my elective courses, library aide. Something I did throughout my entire educational career, even in nursing school. One of things the librarian did for the couple of us that were student aides is acquaint us with the stock market and then had us pick a stock and follow it for the year. My pick was Pepsi. This was 1967-68 I believe. I would love to know what 10 shares of Pepsi, if I could have purchased it then would be worth now. Between, growth, dividend reinvestment and splits, I think I would be fairly rich maybe? I don't know how to find out that kind of info. But it has always made me interested in the stock market. I would have never learned much about the stock market at home since it wasn’t something that was discussed in our home, nor was any investing being done.

[corn18]

10 shares in 1967 would now be 540 shares and worth $58,914

[Gailete]

Hey that isn't bad. Does that include the splits? How do you figure that out?

Thanks for figuring it for me! I'm been curious about that for a long time.

[corn18]

I used this site:

http://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PEP/stock-splits/pepsico-inc-stock-split-history

Pepsico paid a LOT of dividends over that time frame which I did not include in the value.

[Gailete]

$58K without dividends! I do believe that I picked a long time winner back then. But even though I went many years without being able to invest, that period in eigth grade kept me focused until the day I could. Thanks for the link. I will be checking it out when I am done shipping orders.

I also learned a marketable skill from that librarian. I never had trouble getting a work study job in my school's libraries, and included being on the forefront of helping prep the books and set up two new high school libraries. That experienced translated to being able to earn part of my way through college as well as nursing school (as a 30+ mother of two).