I took today off from substituting so I could work on my chip.\u00a0 And while I did work on that chip, it wasn\u2019t the major portion of my day.\u00a0 I also spent a fair amount of time reviewing old lessons, documents and books so I could create a condensed etiquette guide for a friend who was new to Muslim culture and was now interacting with a couple of Muslim women in her class.\u00a0 This was a fun exercise and it was a great review for me.<\/p>\n
In the afternoon, for some reason, I started looking at stocks (OK, that reason is that I read Warren Buffett\u2019s annual report, where it emphasized the importance of a buy and hold strategy).\u00a0 I wanted to know which of the 330 or so stocks that I track would have made me a lot of money had I simply bought them and kept them 13 years ago when I started investing.\u00a0 To date, I\u2019m currently above the S&P500, the \u201caverage\u201d among stocks, but only barely (~20%) because I have bought and sold so many stocks at just the wrong time.\u00a0 Now that I\u2019m getting closer to retirement (in 20 years), I\u2019d like to adopt the buy and hold strategy that I swore I would do when I first started purchasing stocks.<\/p>\n
The list of \u201chome run stocks\u201d turned out to be larger than I had thought.\u00a0 Approximately 60 of the 330 stocks would have made me at least 700% had I held on to them for 13 years \u2013 that’s around17.5% per year compounded!\u00a0 40 of them would have made me 1000% (or ~20% compounded annually).\u00a0 27 of them would have made me 1200% (22% compounded annually).\u00a0 There\u2019s a lesson in this: listening to media, even well-intentioned media like Motley Fool, is a foolish thing to do.\u00a0 All the stock sites I read on a regular basis state that you need to buy and hold your stocks, but then they advise you to buy and sell all kinds of stuff on a monthly basis!\u00a0 Now that I have this list of stocks, and some of those stocks just happen to be on sale right now, I should just buy some of the best ones, and forget about them, like Warren Buffett does.\u00a0 I\u2019d be so much better off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I took today off from substituting so I could work on my chip.\u00a0 And while I did work on that chip, it wasn\u2019t the major portion of my day.\u00a0 I also spent a fair amount of time reviewing old lessons, … Continue reading