[Today’s run: 3.5 miles]<\/p>\n
Somehow through a twisted series of events we ended up with 4 shares of Nokia stock.\u00a0 I think it actually devolved from when we had Lucent stock, which became Alcatel and then Nokia.<\/p>\n
Anyway, today we received a dividend check for $0.97.\u00a0 It started out for something over a dollar but they took out a few cents for some obscure reason and left us with 97 cents.<\/p>\n
So that’s pretty exciting.<\/p>\n
I started my stock trading experience in 5th grade.\u00a0 They gave us check books and taught us how to write checks and keep the balance.\u00a0 And they wanted us to read the stock listings and try to buy some stocks and make money.\u00a0 I don’t know if any of us actually made any money.\u00a0 It is hard to make money in stocks during the 3-4 months of one school semester. And the fun is in trading, so you lose ground by bouncing in and out.\u00a0 (I guess I don’t remember if they charged us a trading fee.\u00a0 It was all imaginary money anyway.)<\/p>\n
When I worked for AT&T for about a year in the mid-1990’s I was in the employee stock purchase program.\u00a0 I ended up with a few shares of that.\u00a0 And that spun off Lucent and some other stuff, and then Lucent spun off some stuff and etc. etc.<\/p>\n
Later on my kids came into a bit of money and I tried to manage that for them.\u00a0 I did well enough anyway, at least I didn’t lose it all, grew it a little bit.\u00a0 My one big bust was Montana Power, which you would think would be a solid stock being a monopoly utility company.\u00a0 But the guy running it got into the new sexy business of fiber optic cable, and he was ahead of the market, over built and went bust.\u00a0 There were a lot of widows and retirees who were not happy with him!\u00a0 I wasn’t too happy either since the stock went to zero.\u00a0 But I had a pretty good run on McGrath RentCorp in California that rented temporary classroom buildings and electronic equipment to places doing chip development.\u00a0 They did really well. And IBM did well for me too.\u00a0 So it didn’t turn out too bad.\u00a0 The kids ended up with enough to get a first car or a semester or two of school.<\/p>\n
During that time we had an investment club at the office and we learned about how to do research and read the numbers, at least a little bit.\u00a0 I was actually a bit proud that I found that McGrath RentCorp by reading those three-ring-binder stock reports at the public library.<\/p>\n
But now I’m down to 4 shares of Nokia and our $0.97 dividend.\u00a0 I’ve got some money in various funds for retirement, pretty much out of my hands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Today’s run: 3.5 miles] Somehow through a twisted series of events we ended up with 4 shares of Nokia stock.\u00a0 I think it actually devolved from when we had Lucent stock, which became Alcatel and then Nokia. Anyway, today we received a dividend check for $0.97.\u00a0 It started out for something over a dollar but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5468,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5467\/revisions\/5468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}