Made my first stock purchase since the dot-com implosion
July 30, 2008I was one of those idiots who thought that delivering 50-pound bags of dog food for free was going to become a profitable business model. Ever since I lost that $2,000 I threw into the Pets.com IPO, I swore off buying individual stocks. Decided I’m not nearly smart enough to understand what makes sense, so I’ve just invested in mutual funds and let those fund managers pick the stocks for me. My money has done much better that way than if I’d been picking the stocks.
Today I finally made my first post-dot-com-implosion purchase of an individual stock. I was doing the semi-annual review of my rollover IRA with the investment guy at the bank (it’s the rollover of all the 401k’s from my previous employers). Turns out one of the funds in my account had dispensed a dividend for some reason. Not sure why, but it meant there was a small chunk of actual cash sitting in the account. It was kinda found money, so we decided to gamble with it. I used up almost all of it to purchase stock in NVidia.
NVidia has been beat up pretty bad lately. Bad earnings reports, problems with buggy GPU’s, and competition from Intel. The reasoning here was that maybe their much-lowered stock price makes them an attractive acquisition target. Their 52-week high was almost $40. Now at $11 somebody might swoop in and pick up the whole company. Even just a price of say $15 would be a nice little profit.
Now I have to go set up a Google alert for “NVidia”. So I know the moment something happens.