Today I said goodbye to some old favorites, stock in iconic northwest companies that everybody has. It used to be that Microsoft was considered pure gold. I had a friend who had managed to fund a lot of college from a few shares of Microsoft bought at the beginning.
When I first bought it, the Microsoft stock split and split. You could NOT go wrong with it. You would not dream of selling it. It was definitely for sure future wealth. If you had Microsoft stock, you could buy and do ANYthing.
Also Costco and Starbucks, prominent northwest companies that everybody has. And we want to support these companies too. I held under 500 shares of each and I had held them for over 20 years. Adieu to old friends.
As my financial person says, we are dating the stock for companies, we're not marrying them.
And sometimes, you just have to move on. I made a nice profit on each of them. But see you later, alligator. I have no faith, take the profits.
This all makes sense. Last night, I finished a book for my memoir class "21 Dog Years" by Mike Daisey, an extremely irreverent and twisted tale of his working for Amazon.com near the beginning. Part of the insanity of dot com years was the constant monitoring of the always increasing stock price. And the uncritical fanatical conviction that the price would never go down and that the stock options of the employees guaranteed unbelievable future wealth.
One day, the author wondered just how he fell into that hopeless shallow trap and he knew he had to leave. It seems very very odd to reading reader views of "21 Dog Years" on the Amazon.com site. If anybody needed to understand the meaning of the term ironic...
Same thing with Microsoft stock. So many people jumping on the bandwagon to the road to certain wealth. Same people, same place, same time.
The dot com crash PLUS the 2008 collapse. Does anybody need to know anything else??
I sold them and I shan't look back.
And we won't even talk about Washington Mutual.
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