I’m not counting tech or biotech stocks from the early/mid 80’s like Microsoft and Apple and Genentech since I was a student and had no money to invest.
I just found out today that Keurig Green Mountain, Inc. (GMCR) has returned over 50% a year for the last 10 years! My company HQ was in DC and when I’d visit I’d see that they had gone to Keurig for their office coffee. I’d known about the company, but it never clicked that they were taking over market share in one of the most lucrative markets there is for that product. It probably saved them money as nobody drinks the last cup in the pot, they toss it out and make a new one, and as it gets later in the day, full pots go unused and get nasty quickly. A $5000 investment made in 2005 would be worth be worth $597K today.
I have tons of these but one other is Crocs. I live in the same town where they started and are HQ’d, and I began to see people wearing them all over town. I thought they were hideous, so didn’t even think of looking into the company. Even when I began to see famous chefs on TV wearing them in their kitchens it didn’t cross my mind to invest.
They went from an IPO price of $15 (well after I noticed them and adjusted for splits) to $75 in 18 months. Of course, the stock tanked after that because the family were a bunch of whackadoos, but I could have made a theoretical $300K on a $5K investment in a year and a half.
And no, I didn’t invest in Google. I thought $100 a share was too much even at the beginning.
So, the only rule is it must be a company you were well familiar with at the time, not some obscure biotech firm that nobody had ever heard of that hit it huge on a new drug.
Apple. Totally missed the boat, thinking that it couldn’t possibly survive against the likes of Intel and Microsoft. I’ve made money on them since, but nothing like the guy I worked with who bought a Porsche by selling off some shares.
I was proudly buying through the stock-purchase-plan when it was at 82…
…while CEO Rich “insider trading” McGinn was dumping his shares. That sure was One Fun August. :dubious:
Say, isn’t that Cary Fiorina from that Same Lucent Management Team? Gee, I wonder if I should ever trust Her as President?
I could be misremembering, but I think it was 5 or 6 years ago when my dad started pestering me hard to buy Ford at 2 bucks a share. He couldn’t imagine Ford ever going out of business, but I sure could.
Last time I looked, it was trading at around 16 or so.
Part of me wonders if I should have invested in Tesla. Their stock is worth $200/share right now.
But then again, they just released their 2014 financial results, and they weren’t good. Their 4Q loss widened (meaning Tesla is still losing money), they missed their sales targets, and reports suggest that Elon Musk is going to bust some heads in Sales because of this. So I’m wondering if this is going to be one of those cases where the people who make a killing are the ones who are savvy enough to dump the stock at its peak. And that’s not a game I care to play.
Another vote for Apple (and per the OP, not from the '80s).
I should have invested in Apple when Steve Jobs returned in the late '90s. I had enough confidence in Apple to buy a Mac in 2000, but not enough to invest.
More backstory: I really needed a new computer in the late '90s, as my Mac IIsi (bought in 1990), was getting old. By 1997, Apple seemed to be going down the tubes. I came very close to buying a PC. But Steve Jobs returned, and Apple experienced a renaissance, giving me enough confidence to buy a new G4 tower and monitor in 2000.
While I’m glad I bought it, if I had invested the $3K I spent on the new computer in Apple stock, it would be worth over $140K today (from the stock low in October 2000).
In college we did simulated stock trading - I got my undergrad in finance.
I had a very basic understanding of options and at the time Toyota had those brake issues and recalls. The stock price plummeted terribly - several billion dollars of capital gone. I knew this didn’t make sense as the problem was quite specific and recitfied immediately. People would continue buying Toyota.
I bought $16,000 worth of options and sold them days later for around $100,000
in digital currency
I wanted to put every penny of my life savings into that deal but the timing wasn’t right.
My mom bought 500 shares at 1.39. This was in the autumn of 2008 when everything was collapsing and she also bought 500 each of Citibank, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and a couple of others. All came back but none as much as Ford.
When my son started working at Microsoft in 1990, I thought I should have invested $10K in them. But my youngest was about to go off to college and it would have been hard. The stock split 72 times between then and 2000. A year and a half later, my mortgage was paid off and I could have gotten a new mortgage and invested $100K. Wow!
I spent the month Jan., 1997 visiting the CS dept. at Stanford U. I got to know a grad student named Sergey Brin (his advisor tasked him to show me the sights of San Fransisco, where we did things like walk exactly halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge). Sergey gave a seminar talk in which he described his idea for a new browser. I should have said, “Sergey, if you start a company, let me invest.” At that time, I could easily have raised a couple tens of thousands. But of course I didn’t. :smack:
