The Current Risk of Utility Stock Investing
I have a special fondness for York Water (YORW) stock because it has been paying out dividends uninterrupted since 1916. If you can keep sending cash to your owners during General Sherman’s March to...
View ArticleESPN Subscriber Loss: How Far From Economic Crisis?
As cable subscriber counts have dwindled in recent years, many analysts have been focused on the effect upon ESPN and its parent entity The Walt Disney Company (DIS). The reason for this is because the...
View ArticleWarren Buffett The Dividend Investor
I have heard it repeated over and over again that dividends don’t matter to Warren Buffett, and therefore, should not play any meaningful role in how other investors arrange their personal affairs....
View ArticleTy Cobb’s Estate Would Own More Coca-Cola Stock Than Warren Buffett
A noteworthy investing passage from page 155 of Charles Alexander’s book “Ty Cobb”: “In the 1920s, Cobb’s Coca-Cola stock would prove particularly renumerative. Since his first commercial endorsements...
View ArticleHilton Worldwide: Stock Spinoffs, Reverse Stock Split
Big news for shareholders and prospective shareholders of Hilton Worldwide (HLT): First, the Board of Directors at Hilton Hotels is spinning off two businesses to shareholders. It is bundling its...
View ArticleJP Morgan Flirts With Special Dividend
One of the first articles I ever wrote as a columnist at Seeking Alpha was titled “JP Morgan: A Smart Bet For The Patient Investor” in which I offered: “If you are a patient investor, and have a 5-10...
View ArticleHigh Growth, High Valuation At Starbucks (SBUX)
Wow. The management team at Starbucks does not seem wedded to the public disclosure policy of “promise low, deliver high.” At an investor’s conference in New York today, Starbucks unveiled very...
View ArticleWarren Buffett Sells More Wal-Mart Stock
Berkshire Hathaway’s position in Wal-Mart (WMT) stock, which hit a high of 60 million shares at the end of 2014, has been slashed to 13 million shares as of Berkshire’s most recent quarterly filing....
View ArticleBank of America Stock Finally Delivers The Wealth
On February 9th, 2016, I wrote the article: “Bank of America Stock: Getting Dirt Cheap” in which I argued: But when the earnings are so high relative to the price of the stock, why would you discard it...
View ArticleMuhtar Kent Resigns as CEO of Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent announced this morning that he is departing from his chief executive position of the world’s largest beverage producer that is in charge of producing 3.5% of all liquid...
View ArticleMired In Stock Market Froth
Unless I think a business is trading at a discount, I don’t cheer stock price movement forward. I cheer on earnings growth. If a business grows by 5% in a year, I expect the stock to go up by 5%, all...
View ArticleWhen Should A Company Pay A Special Dividend?
Usually, you only hear discussions of special dividends when a country’s tax rates are about to increase and a corporation wants to throw some cash at shareholders before the higher rates take effect....
View ArticleUpdate on General Electric’s Stock Buyback Program
In the past, I have been critical of the effectiveness of the stock buyback programs at mega-cap firms like General Electric (GE) and Bank of America (BAC). Even though I have considered both stocks to...
View ArticleBoeing Hikes Dividend By 30%
From 2001 through 2003, Boeing’s dividend froze at an annual rate of $0.68 per share. From 2007 through 2012, Boeing’s dividend only grew by 3% annually and included a freeze of $1.68 per share from...
View ArticleUnilever Is One Of The First Stocks I’d Stick In A Trust Fund
If someone entrusted me with $2.5 million to set up a trust fund for a loved one, one of the first purchases would be 1,000 shares of Unilever (UL). I use this fiction as the frame for this Unilever...
View ArticleIn Defense of The Atlanta Braves’ Career Advice
When Friedrich Hayek published “The Use of Knowledge in Society” in a 1945 edition of American Economic Review, he argued that an often neglected reason why capitalist economies create more wealth than...
View ArticleThe Inflation Tax on Certificates of Deposit
An advantage that I have coming of age in the 2000s is that I have no reference or anchoring point to the “good old days” when savers could get real returns just by holding money in a savings account...
View ArticleClosed-End Funds: Looming Interest Rate Bubble
I don’t think I have ever written about closed-end funds. It’s not because there is anything inherently wrong with the structure. They’re like traditional mutual funds except they don’t trade according...
View ArticleDo Blue-Chip Stocks Stop Growing?
Check out the nine and a half minute mark of this charmingly clunky video from Peter Lynch. It contains the following quote: “McDonald’s earnings have gone up, I think, more than 80 fold over the last...
View ArticleTesla Begins To Police The Perks
Tesla and Amazon have always been on my “too hard” pile to figure out as an investment. I commend what they are doing to innovate their industries, but I could never quite figure out how to reconcile...
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