One of my favorite speeches of Charlie Munger, which Warren Buffett co-opted when he spoke at Florida University, was the story of how to turn $40 into $5 million. It was a story about Coca-Cola stock, and the conditions that can lead to super large financial rewards based on modest financial investments. The premise is this—you need a product that is super cheap to make and possesses enough brand equity that people will buy it deliberately on a regular basis.
Even before I encountered this story, I knew that the beverage industry has been a very lucrative place to make money if you want to make an initial investment and then grow richer in the coming years without having to do anything. Diageo, Anheuser Busch, and Brown Forman all have long records of growing profits per share and dividend payouts that are significantly higher each decade than the previous.
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