Earning Money As A Child
Over the weekend, I had my family stocks come in from out of town and they spent a week with us. My nephew made the Junior Olympics and was out in Colorado for two weeks before that. It costs a lot of money to ski, and so we sent him a check as a “donation” to help him get out there and to pay for the runs and the lift tickets and the entry fee and everything else.
His dad, my brother-in-law, said that he wanted Aiden to work off the money that we gave him. When he came down, Aiden thought I was going to give him physical labor to do. I said, “Nope. You’re coming to the office and we’re going to talk stocks.” Which he was totally confused by, which just made it all the more awesome.
Learning About Stocks
When I was younger, I think in sixth or seventh grade, my uncle gave me a little blue book that would come out monthly that had every single ticker symbol, the volume of shares, price, yield, dividend, and all the stats in the book. I would go through them one by one and I would have to find certain companies based on the parameters he gave us. One of the parameters he gave us was to look for a low PE ratio, that’s a price-to-earnings ratio and a high yield.
The PE ratio is the ratio of a company’s stock price to the company’s earnings per share. The PE ratio is used in valuing companies. The average PE of the market varies in relation to the predicted growth in earnings, the expected stability of those rising (or falling) earnings, inflation, and yields of competitor investments. Yield is the quotient of earnings per share divided by the share price. It is the reciprocal of the PE ratio. This number can be used to compare the earnings of a stock, sector, or the whole market.
He would then use our picks and evaluate them to see if he wanted to purchase the companies. We would find usually a dozen.
Teaching My Nephew The Way That I Learned stocks
I thought, let’s do the exact same exercise with Aiden. I first instructed him to, “Go buy Barron’s paper and a Wall Street Journal.” Come to find out, Wall Street Journals no longer put the ticker symbols in there on there, at least in this daily version. Maybe on the weekends, they do. Luckily, he bought a Barron’s and it had the New York Stock Exchange in there along with the NASDAQ.
He went through and picked out 24 companies that had high yields and low PE ratios. All the PE ratios had to be around 10 and all the yields were over 8%. What we’re looking for here is not growth companies. We’re looking for was the opposite. Low-growth companies pay out a large percentage of their earnings.
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The Unexpected Outcome of My Nephew’s Research
My initial thought was we were going to get a lot of oil companies or finance companies or we close-end funds. Closed-end funds I want to stay away from. We were going to get energy companies and real estate companies too, that was my guess. Of the 24 he came back to me with, he decided to pick six of them and narrow it down. See the stocks that he picked here. The different colors represent the different industries.
Building stocks Exposure For The Next Generation
To make it interesting, I said, “Aiden, what happens if we opened up an account, a brokerage account? We’re not going to mention any names. I wrote a check and we put money into each one of those. You could track it on a daily, or weekly basis. It’s up to you to decide when to sell and when to buy. Oh, by the way, if you want to throw Nike and Under Armour and Snap Chat in there you can, some of these other companies that resonate with you, please do that.” I told him we’d split the profits 50/50 but he has to manage the portfolio.
My goal with all of this is just to build exposure for him. I also turned around and recommended he read Rich Dad Poor Dad, which was, as you can see in some other blog posts, the jumping-off-the-cliff book that I read, but not until my senior year in high school.