Recently, I have decided to get into buying stocks.
Honestly, I don’t buy stocks to make money. I think timing the market is dumb, I think chasing the market is dumber, and I’m not particularly interested in buying and selling stocks on anything but a long term basis.
So why did I buy a share of Disney and two shares of Coca-Cola recently?
Here’s the truth about stocks: most people don’t really know what they’re for. Many people treat stocks speculatively, and there’s certainly an argument to be made for doing so by those who wish to do so, but a stock is actually a share of ownership in a company. By buying those stocks, I became a part owner of Coca-Cola and Disney.
And shareholders have the kind of voice with a company that non-shareholders don’t.
I’m not stupid. I have no illusions that a one share stockholder like me is going to have any kind of outsized voice in the company. Truth is, I’ll have very little voice. But it still buys me a voice I wouldn’t have otherwise. And the price of buying the voice in the company is one share of stock.
They don’t have to listen to me, but they do have to let me speak. Owning a share grants me that much, anyway.
And I will tell them, in no uncertain terms, that their anti-racist woke tomfoolery is stupid, harming the value of my share, and they really should stop it.
There are some more companies that I will buy as money becomes available. I will buy Nike, American Airlines, and Twitter, as well as few others. And I’ll make a bit of a pain of myself with them as well. If I’m going to spend that kind of money to get a voice, I fully intend on using it.
I call this shareholder activism, and frankly, I don’t know why more people don’t do it.
Though I guess I’ll shortly find out.
The honest truth, though? I never had any intention of making money with these stocks. I bought them for the voice. And I have no intention of ever selling them. But I guess a dividend is a nice little bonus, small as it may be.