What Is Funny?

Today, we go through some investing tips for those looking to bulk up their portfolio in a down market.  Remember that smart investing begins with research—that’s why I’ve spent the last 23 minutes researching MANY of the companies listed on the various stock-exchange thingies so that you don’t have to.  With that, here are my BUY, SELL, and HOLD recommendations for the week.

Let’s start with BUY.  I am definitely recommending buying stock in Baskin-Robbins, a company whose recent Ice Cream Cake advertisement combines the brilliance of being extremely annoying, with the usefulness of only telling us things we already know (Baskin Robbins sells ice cream cakes!).  This is just what this company needs to skyrocket to record profits in the next quarter. Unfortunately, through my in-depth research on who owns Baskin-Robbins, it looks like buying stock in the company may prove tricky—here’s its corporate history:

Baskin-Robbins was owned by the founders until purchased in 1967 (just prior to Burt Baskin‘s death) by the United Brands Company (United Fruit). In 1972, the company went public for the only time in its history when United Brands sold 17% in an IPO. A year later (1973), the British food company J. Lyons and Co. purchased Baskin-Robbins from United Brands and all the public stock. J. Lyons then merged with Allied Breweries, becoming Allied-Lyons in 1978. Allied-Lyons then merged with Pedro Domecq S.A. in 1994 and became Allied Domecq. Baskin-Robbins, Togo’s, and Dunkin’ Donuts now comprise Dunkin’ Brands, Inc. Dunkin’ Brands was part of Allied Domecq until its purchase in 2006 by a group of private equity firms – Bain Capital, Thomas Lee and The Carlyle Group

So, based on this, I recommend calling up this Thomas Lee guy and asking him to buy stock in his company. That’s how you invest like a smart investor.

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As for my SELL recommendation.  Dump your shares of Chevron Inc.  While gas prices continue to rise, there are never any convenient Chevrons wherever I drive. It’s like they came up with a strategy to always be positioned on the least convenient side of the street no matter which way you are heading! I don’t know how they pulled this off, but I believe this strategy will fail.  I buy about $60 worth of gas a month and right now Chevron is getting literally 0% of this.  Over 1,000 years, that equates to a loss of roughly $720,000.  If there is someone like me in each of the 50 states, that means a loss of 36 MILLION DOLLARS, or, put another way .2% of their annual profits!  Ouch.  Sell, sell, sell!

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For my HOLD recommendation, I am going with Sprint Nextel Corp. which per a very trusted source has yielded the best return in 2009.  So if you have this stock, you definitely want to hold onto it.  The real question is what to do if you don’t have the stock and you want to follow my advice and hold onto it. I’m actually in this boat.  Here’s the plan. I would call Sprint Nextel and tell them that at the start of 2009 you ordered 10,000 shares of Sprint Nextel stock but you never received it. Then, they’ll look up your customer record and say they never received any order or maybe they’ll just inform you that you that stock is traded on a secondary market and not purchased directly from a company over the phone.

In any case, you should start yelling at the person and tell them you know they’re just some 11 year old kid at a phone bank somewhere outside the slums of Calcutta.  They’ll be polite but say you’re wrong. It’s important at this time that you continue screaming and berating the person until they pass you along to a manager. Repeat the same process with the manager until you get passed along to whoever manages the manager.

At this point, you should have everyone pretty fed up with you so it’s time to make your second offer. Ask for a free Sprint Nextel shirt instead or your original request for 10,000 shares of stock. They’ll almost certainly send you one. If you’re ballsy, ask for a mousepad.  Then, all you have to do is hold onto this shirt and watch it appreciate in value. I have an MCI Worldcom Shirt in my closet right now that is probably worth triple what it cost in 1996 when I got it.

Happy investing everyone.

Tags: buy sell hold, Financial

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 9:46 pm and is filed under Financial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.