I almost invested $1000 in WalMart In 1986

I even talked to a stockbroker on the phone. He said he "liked" the stock.

Damn I wish I went through with it. I don't know how much I would've made, but it would have been alot.

Here's a good tip for you "Haliburton" Now go and invest....
Dirty money makes the world go round.

I'm just saying I could have made a bunch of money, but somehow I turned it down. Maybe I felt deep-down that it was going to be dirty money, or maybe I was just young and dumb. :)

bought more and more stock over time and taken controll of wal-mart

Yeah!

:party:

Wal Mart was

8-Jul-86 2.15
7-Jul-86 2.25
3-Jul-86 2.37
2-Jul-86 2.39
1-Jul-86 2.36
30-Jun-86 2.32


(It's actual price was around $46, but adjusting for all the splits in the meantime, it had an adjusted stock price of, let's say, $2.20.

So you had $1000 worth, which is 454.55 shares (let's assume no brokerage fees).

On Friday, December 5, wal Mart closed at $53.48.

Assuming that all your dividends over time were NOT re-invested, you would now have 454.55 shares at $53.48, worth $24,309; which is a CAGR of 20.3%, which is pretty darned tooting good.

Trying to do this math including what would have happened if you had had all the dividends reinvested in stock is too difficult, since I don't know how to get the data, and the math itself just becomes a nightmare, but one could guess that maybe it would be about $30,000, or a CAGR of approx. 21.9%.

at todays market rate.

why would making a fair and legal profit on a stock forever STAIN your human soul? Investments are not a sin. WalMart is tacky and ruthless; I wouls NEVER shop there but I would never see anyone damned to hell forever more because they profitted from the a smart stock buy of a legal company -- the largest retailer in the world, in fact. We don't like it when the Christian Coalition moralizes to us and I'm not-so- sure we need to be putting down how anyone else invests. $30K profit is someone's college tuition!

If one has stock, one has a vote in a company.

And one can make shareholder proposals.

One could make the argument that NOT owning stock in the company could be evil, because then one is, through non-action, allowing the evil to continue unchecked.

Is there much of a chance of a person owning 454 shares making a huge difference? No, maybe not. But so what?

To claim someone is evil just becuase they own stock in a certain company is the kind of moral high-horsing that the religious right is adept at. I'm also bothered by these large insitutional investors who invest only in 'socially conscious' companies - if one has the ability to buy shares in lots of millions, one should buy in companies that need to change. Millions of shares are a lot of votes.

...the more of these kinds of things you have in your "what if" file. Around here, you can't shake a stick without hitting someone who has a "I should've bought that condo in Vail for $5,000" story. :)