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My Investment Strategery or Watch Out, Warren Buffet

Sat, 02/15/2003 - 03:23 — deadprogrammer

My investments remind me of this Seinfeld’s monologue :

“I’m not an investor. People always tell me, you should have your money working for you. I’ve decided I’ll do the work. I’m gonna let the money relax. You know what I mean? ‘Cause you send your money out there - working for you - a lot of times, it gets fired. You go back there, “What happened? I had my money. It was here, it was working for me.” “Yeah, I remember your money. Showing up late. Taking time off. We had to let him go.” ”

The first stock that I ever bought was of a now defunct company called Molecular Biosystems that traded under the ticker symbol MB. Their only product was a special contrast agent for CAT scans or something like that. I bought the stock because of the name. It seemed cool. All scientific and such. And just two letters. I think the return on investment was something like -50%. I don’t remember.

Since then I’ve read a bunch of investment books, and was very impressed with Warren Buffet’s investment strategies. I decided I’d buy only a few stocks of companies that I liked, knew and understood.

The list came down to 4 companies. Palm [PALM] (actually 3COM when I bought it and later, after I’ve got PALM shares after the split I bought Handspring [HAND]), Gemstar[GMSTE] (I bought TV Guide shares, they were later converted to GMST shares), Krispy Kreme Donuts [KKD] and Berkshire Hathaway [BRKB].

Out of the four, I invested in 2. Palm and Gemstar. And here’s how I did:

Interestingly enough, at some point, when I was down about 15% (after being up 70%) I considered selling all the stocks and buying a La Marzocco instead. I didn’t.

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