One of the reasons why I have chosen blue-chip investing as the medium of choice to advocate is because there is so much downside protection—absent falling demand due to technology change or a lack of liquidity and a super-leveraged balance sheet like you saw at Wachovia, it’s almost impossible to take down a $100 billion company.
Anyway, I was checking the numbers on what has happened to General Electric stockholders over the past decade, and they’re officially in the black: if they dutifully reinvested and let their GE shares run on autopilot, they would have grown their position from 322 shares outstanding to 460 shares, and giving them total annual returns in the 1.5-2% range.
No, those aren’t returns to aim for at the moment of contemplation, but think about the conditions that existed and surrounded a GE investment over the past decade: the company was trading at 22x profits … Read the rest of this article!