Buy and Hold: My Previous Life
The next stage in my investing career, I followed the age old buy and hold strategy. I started my search by looking at companies I knew personally and liked. I looked up articles on fundamental analysis and examined financial statements. I attempted to look at research reports and articles about the company. I looked at different industries to make sure that I was diversifying properly.
I bought Marvel Entertainment (MVL) since they were switching their business model from toys/comics to movies, Pepsico (PEP) for their advantage over Coke in health products, and Unitedhealth Group (UNH) because they were my health insurance company and the overall lifespan of human beings were getting longer and longer. I bought Shuffle Master (SHFL) because I knew that poker was the next big thing, Netease.com (NTES) because I knew that online gaming would be unstoppable in a nascent, enormous market like China, and Cisco (CSCO) since networking was going to power the internet revolution.
I held the majority of these stocks for the span of over 3 years and made a good profit. I felt like a stock pro, and life was good…