[today’s run: 5 miles]
A long time ago I worked for NCR. NCR was an independent company for decades. Shortly before I joined them they were purchased by AT&T. One of the benefits of working there was an employee stock purchase program. I was able to set aside a bit of money each paycheck for AT&T stock.
I worked for NCR for about a year, more or less. I think I ended up with maybe 20 (?) shares of AT&T stock.
Then AT&T rolled out Lucent. Lucent rolled out Avaya, Agere, and I think some others. Agere was sold to LSI. (Somewhere along the line I bought some shares of Lucent outright. A big mistake.)
I sold the original AT&T stock long ago. Somehow, out of all of this I still have 2 shares of LSI. And today we got a letter and a check in the mail because LSI has declared a quarterly dividend of $0.03 per share. That’s 24 cents a year! WhooHoo!
This is the way Bill Gates makes his money. Now it’s working for me.
My experience with being a small-share stockholder is that they eventually see the waste of money going into sending me voting papers and other stuff and they will, by fiat, send me a check and buy back my shares. Lucent did it through a reverse-split and buying out anyone with less than a whole share at the end. But LSI has not done it yet.
