How To Build Wealth From Scratch
An acquaintance of mine serviced vending machines near campus as a part-time job in college. At some point, he purchased and acquired actual ownership of seven of the vending machines that he...
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Oil Stock Dividend Safety
Lately, I’ve been reviewing the relationship between dividends and earnings (as well as cash flow) among five of the six energy supermajors on the planet: ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell,...
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How To Avoid Panic Selling Your Stocks
One of the crazy things about stock market investing is that we can unload a stock on a whim. We could spend three decades owning some Exxon stock passed down to us from our great-grandparents,...
View ArticleWD-40 Is An Undiscovered Gem Of An Investment
Edward H. Heller, the famed venture capitalist of the early 20th century, had a knack for spotting small-cap stocks that would make their investors a lot of money as they grew to become mid-cap stocks....
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Dividend Investing In The Context Of Your Life
I spent much of the last evening reading a biography on Judy Garland (Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz). I was surprised to learn, at least from the biographer’s point of view, how sad and unhappy most...
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Long-Term Investing Is Easier Than You Think
I got my hands on a Kiplinger Magazine from 1990 the other day, and one article was a list of the “Top 10 Picks For The Next Decade” by an investment club that had monthly meetings in Texas. The ten...
View ArticleThe Search for 20% Annual Returns
As some of you know, I analyze and discuss attractive stocks in the market over on Patreon, which you can assess here. However, since I have done a terrible job of marketing it, I wanted to include an...
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Where Should A Dividend Investor Begin?
The best accidental side effect of running a website and writing articles for Seeking Alpha is that it occasionally allows me to stumble into friends I haven’t to in a while—the kind of people that...
View ArticleWhy Mattress Stores Are Everywhere
The profit margins that mattress stores are able to achieve are absolutely staggering. If you want to earn obscene returns on capital in life, it seems that selling bottled water, operating a surgical...
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Total SA: This Dividend Stock Could Be Your Own Personal Oil Well
For a couple reasons, I have never bought any stock in Total SA: -The French government is a taxing nightmare. Last year, Total SA had a 55% income tax rate, and there is pending bills in the French...
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An Important Investing Lesson From Benjamin Graham
I was recently going over some of Benjamin Graham’s old lectures at Columbia University when I came upon one gem of wisdom that I wanted to share with you. In my paraphrase, Graham said this:...
View ArticleMark Twain’s Failed Paige Compositor Investment
“Ah, if only he could die temporarily!” Mark Twain’s signature character Tom Sawyer thought after initial romantic rejection from neighbor girl Becky Thatcher. In real life in April 1894, in what is...
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Be Completely Honest About Your Investing Weakness
Warren Buffett once said, “I’ve never swung at a ball while it’s still in the pitcher’s glove.” Incidentally, that perfectly describes the category of investing mistakes that I am prone to make—I am...
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Why Dividend Stocks Are Great For Beginning Investors
I have recently been working my way through Howard Schilit’s book “Financial Shenanigans” which teaches intermediate investors the skills to identify companies possibly engaging in accounting behavior...
View ArticleThe Secret Health Care Plans Of The 1%
When you acquire a specialized skill of value, people will pay more for your services. As famed management writer Peter Drucker once said, “The economic and social gravity of America will increasingly...
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Some Investing Wisdom From The Roman Poet Horace
At about 2:30 in the afternoon, today, July 1st, I took a look at my Seeking Alpha screen of the stocks that I follow and noticed that every single company I follow is up 1% or 2%: Personally, I get...
View ArticleA Crazy Fact About Wal-Mart
Here is something I recently learned while reading Wal-Mart’s financial statements that I thought I would share with you: Over ¾ of Wal-Mart’s inventory gets sold before The Wal-Mart Corporation even...
View ArticleThe Search For The Next Coca-Cola
In the most recent article that I published on Patron, I covered the stock that I believe is the most likely to be the Coca-Cola of the next generation. When I describe something as the next Coca-Cola,...
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Another July 1st, Another Million Dollars For Bobby Bonilla
Thought you had a good day, today? Probably not as good as Bobby Bonilla. On January 3rd, 2000, the New York Mets bought out the final year of Bobby Bonilla’s $5.9 million salary with the team. The...
View ArticleCrayola’s Dominance Of The Art Supply Market
An underrated parenting technique is to have your child make a self-deprecating joke in response to light teasing. Nothing triggers the impulse to make fun of someone quite like discovering that the...
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