We've asked each of our bloggers to
introduce themselves and talk a little about why they love the market and what positions they call their own. We encourage our bloggers to own common stock and abide by a common
code of conduct.Who are you, and why are you passionate about stocks?
I was eight years old, and I always had my nose buried in a book. One day I picked up a children's novel with a eight-year-old hero who (like me) was on the brainy (read: nerdy) side. This hero's reading matter, though, was the Wall Street Journal, and his investments were as precocious as his vocabulary. Since then, I've been fascinated with the concept of owning stocks and the products, people and strategies behind the paper.
Companies, I believe, have a personality and it is by understanding this personality that financial success and failure can be divined. The beginnings of this theory were born during college, where I majored in journalism and honored the beauty of the middle column of the Wall Street Journal. Once I graduated, I took my study to the halls of finance, working as an investment banking analyst in the Loan Syndications group at First Union, and later as an associate in the Global Finance group at Merrill Lynch.
After getting my MBA from Wharton, however, I followed the siren song of the dotcom and puddle-jumped from one gutsy startup to the next, learning the ways of the venture capitalist and doing such interesting things as meeting Meg Whitman and creating financial projections for seven different ways to avoid bankruptcy.
In the midst of this all, I had children, and began blogging about them, and about my string of gutsy startups. Soon I was working for Blogging Baby and writing around the clock. When Weblogs, Inc. decided to work together with AOL Money & Finance to launch a group of stock blogs, and asked me to make it happen, I jumped at the chance.
What was the first stock you owned?
My first stock purchase was a
little company called Mercury Finance. I was 22. My office mate, Jim, had called on the company in his previous job and
he told me it was a great buy. I looked them up, I evaluated their financials. It seemed to be a deal and I sunk about
$1,000 of my first investment banking bonus into the stock.
We were up 50% and I was feeling smug (and
lucky) when an odd news item popped up in my usually quiet alert page. The CFO had gone missing. Soon it was announced
that the company had cooked the books, several years' worth, and two weeks later said CFO suffered a mysterious heart
attack.
What is your worst investment ever?
I know you're
thinking I'm going to say, "Mercury Finance," but no. Only a few months after my $1k loss, my boyfriend (at
the time) had a party. He got epically drunk. Coincidentally, that night, ValuJet's Flight 592 went down over the Everglades, killing
everyone aboard. My usually impervious and very conservative boyfriend sobbed in front of the TV.
The next
day, he insisted we should buy ValuJet. He told me it was smart, that most airline stocks plummeted the day after a
crash, later to rebound. We'd make a nice little chunk of change by selling on the uptick. In retrospect I wonder if he
was trying to regain whatever authority he'd lost during his uncharacteristic outburst by profiting from his emotional
low. Either way I should hever have listened to him.
ValuJet's rebound never happened; the company was too
low-budget to survive the PR firestorm that occurred when its maintenance record was challenged. They sold their assets
to another airline and my stock ended up worth nothing. Another timely buy turned out to have been vastly un-timely.
That was the last time you listened to anyone else's
stock tip, right?
No, evidently it's three times that is the charm, for me. When a group of my bosses at
First Union started snapping up shares of Midcom Communications the year after ValuJet's crash, they evangelized me on
the brilliant prospects of the little company with almost no revenues. Evidently, the management team was top-notch and
the payoff was almost certain.
Today, I still own a few hundred shares of Midcom. I get statements every
quarter from my brokerage account at Wachovia (First Union's new identity), showing my balance of $0. It's an excellent
reminder only to invest in companies for which I have developed a passion entirely independently.
What is your investing success story?
There are a lot, really; I invested every
penny of my 401(k) program at First Union into their stock and doubled my money by selling just before starting
business school. I was lucky, that stock price is still a few dollars from its all-time high. But I think my favorite
story is eBay. I knew the company intimately, having become an addict and an eBay analyst early (you should have seen
my spreadsheets) and getting to know the company's management team at a handshake level after they invested in one of
my aforementioned gutsy startups.
When I became pregnant in late 2001 and suddenly had to buy a house, I sold my eBay stock, making exactly enough money for my down payment. Since then,
my house has doubled in value, meaning my $2,500 investment in eBay is now worth over $150,000 (not to mention a roof
over my head). Now that's a return worth writing home about.
What do you own now?
I own a few shares each
of eBay, Starbucks, XM Satellite Radio, JC Penney, Krispy Kreme and Brinker Int'l. The only one of those I regret (and
the only one that's down) is Krispy Kreme. Stupid, stupid! I knew better than to buy stock in a company that couldn't
even spell its own name correctly. As unsexy as JC Penney is (it was my husband's call), it's a brilliant success
story, up over 400% since I purchased it. If only I owned more than 1.6987 shares...
What are you cheap about?
I refuse to buy brand name groceries, unless they're
on sale, and I never spend more than $9 on a bottle of wine. I'm an extremely detail-oriented grocery shopper and I've
been known to leave a store without buying something I absolutely need because I can't bear to pay 25 cents each for
size five diapers! The idea! I'm a little neurotic. But isn't that why you
love me?
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