I took today off from substituting so I could work on my chip.  And while I did work on that chip, it wasn’t the major portion of my day.  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.  This was a fun exercise and it was a great review for me.

In the afternoon, for some reason, I started looking at stocks (OK, that reason is that I read Warren Buffett’s annual report, where it emphasized the importance of a buy and hold strategy).  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.  To date, I’m currently above the S&P500, the “average” among stocks, but only barely (~20%) because I have bought and sold so many stocks at just the wrong time.  Now that I’m getting closer to retirement (in 20 years), I’d like to adopt the buy and hold strategy that I swore I would do when I first started purchasing stocks.

The list of “home run stocks” turned out to be larger than I had thought.  Approximately 60 of the 330 stocks would have made me at least 700% had I held on to them for 13 years – that’s around17.5% per year compounded!  40 of them would have made me 1000% (or ~20% compounded annually).  27 of them would have made me 1200% (22% compounded annually).  There’s a lesson in this: listening to media, even well-intentioned media like Motley Fool, is a foolish thing to do.  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!  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.  I’d be so much better off.