FR: Avoid the Post Office With This Industry Leader

Article: Avoid the Post Office With This Industry Leader

My first “Fool Revisited” piece in a while looks to be about a company that has done quite well for itself in the nearly seven years that I wrote the article. I’d like to think that my stupid little piece had an impact on that, but I am also humble enough to know that that is not the case.

If you listen to any number of podcasts, you might here advertisements for Stamps.com (Nasdaq: STMP). The pitch is that they send you a free scale and you can “buy and print postage” from your house, avoiding the post office altogether. Even then, this seemed like a quaint idea, as if a majority of people were still going to the post office to mail things. With the advent of social media and wider acceptance of email, it seemed to me that the act of mailing things to folks was going to be reserved for packages and companies like FedEx (NYSE: FDX) and UPS (NYSE: UPS), among others. Continue reading “FR: Avoid the Post Office With This Industry Leader” →

FR: A Decade of performance from 7 Dow Stocks

Article: A Decade of performance from 7 Dow Stocks

In my final “Fool Revisited” post this week, I will be finishing off my mini-series on the Dow with the remaining seven components of the Dow (at least at the time). The previous three entries of this group covered the oldest members of the Dow, the newest members, and a group where each company had at least 20 years as a member of the Dow Jones. This final article talks about the remaining seven companies, and as mentioned in my article, all these companies were added on two separate days in the late ‘90s: March 17, 1997 and November 1, 1999.

This group features the first companies – Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) added to the average that were not listed on the New York Stock Exchange, a pretty big deal at the time. (They were later followed by Apple and Cisco Systems). This list also features two companies that were removed from the Dow in subsequent years – Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) left the average in 2013 and AT&T (NYSE: T) was replaced by the aforementioned Apple in 2015. Continue reading “FR: A Decade of performance from 7 Dow Stocks” →

FR: These Davids Beat the Banking Goliaths

Article: These Davids Beat the Banking Goliaths

Remember how I’ve spent some of this “Fool Revisited” breaking down some regional banks? (Southwest, Midwest, Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast and Pacific in case you missed them). My next article was me further laying the foundation of regional banks being better than the “too big to fail” banks that everyone knows and loves – in this context Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo.

In one attempt to find a niche as a financial writer, I decided that there might be hay to be made among these “lower-tier” banks. Everybody and their mother covered the day-to-day happenings at the big banks (I even did it for a while towards the end of my Foolish tenure), but the regionals seemed to be a relatively untapped market aside from a few of the larger ones or merger/failure news. This article was the first brick that I laid my foundation as a “regional bank expert,” and was a theme that I would come back to in the future when looking for opportunities in the financial sector. Continue reading “FR: These Davids Beat the Banking Goliaths” →

FR: Make Money Along With This CEO

Article: Make Money Along With This CEO

The first “Fool Revisited” piece today was yet another article written about Under Armour (NYSE: UAA). It is pretty obvious from some of my first articles that I wrote for the Fool that I had an affinity for the company, and this was a further expansion of that with a discussion on CEO Kevin Plank’s compensation received for shepherding the company through a period of seemingly never-ending growth.

This was an attempt to expand on the idea of qualitative investing versus quantitative investing. While it is important to point to whatever metrics make sense to you as you are choosing a company, numbers often don’t tell the whole story. A company – like Under Armour and thousands of others – can be doing exceptionally well, and sometimes the numbers are just hard to put into context all things considered, so it can be important to take a step back from time to time to examine the entire picture. Continue reading “FR: Make Money Along With This CEO” →