No Bananas for My Rachael Ray Blender
Aug 3rd, 2007 by jasoncalhoun
Watch the video. Read the article. I think it fits…
This last week I took a look into the Stock Exchange. I thought it might be interesting to see what would happen or could happen if one were to take a minimalist’s approach to the stock market and start trading. I thought I would be as good as anyone at picking solid technology stocks since I’ve been in the industry for the last decade or so. Using Google Finance, I pretended to buy Yahoo, Novell and Redhat all priced at a bargain! Google was well over $500 per share so I I couldn’t afford even one share. Well, as luck would have it, the market took a tumble hours after I set up my virtual purchases.That afternoon a news release was made that affected everyone. One of the nations top mortgage lenders, American Home Mortgage Investment Corp., was having troubles producing money to back the loans they made and since their market is residential home loans there wasn’t anyone on Wall Street that wanted to bail them out. From what I’m reading, they can’t pay dividends owed to shareholders, and their shares are worthless, so that put the whole market in a downward spin. Some stocks have recovered and others are still moving back up slowly. Of course had I purchased after that event I would have hit one of the biggest stock market sales of the year.
I invited some other colleagues to play my little game. The rules are simple, start with 500 (virtual) bucks, invest in what you want and your virtual fees are 7 dollars per trade. One guy who got in, put all his money into Sprint. Another searched for the stock that had the biggest loss, and was dirt cheap and made sure it was indeed a reputable company and bought a bunch of it. The company was Salton. They hold brand names such as George Foreman™, Toastmaster®, Breadman®, Juiceman®, Westinghouse®, Farberware®, Melitta®, Russell Hobbs®, Tower®, and Haden®. They even sell a Rachael Ray Blender! My friend bought the Salton stock at 40 cents a share. Thats like over a thousand shares! What a deal, right? Time will tell. They had some real bad timing. In addition to being victim of a shaky market, they had merger go bad just days before. Well, today the Salton stock shot up to 69 cents a share. If he would have sold he could have made somewhere over $300 on a $500 dollar investment… Not bad for a day!
I got to thinking about his logic, and applied it to another search. I found that Chiquita, the banana company, had a major loss. I’m thinking well heck, There’s a no-brainer. What could be wrong with that? It’s everyone’s favorite banana right? As it turns out, the Cincinnati based company’s stock plunged after they admitted to the Federal Dept. of Justice that they were paying over a million out to Columbian terror groups for protection of farm land. Now they are being taken to court buy the federal government. Maybe I should stick with Apple.
“Yes, we have no bananas today.”