Kirby joined the capital group in 1965 and worked there for 40 years until his heart attack in 2005. I believe he meet the widow during his time at capital group. I worked there for 12 years but am not sure if anyone from that era is still around. Will inquire and see if anyone knows more.Still doesn't answer the question of whether all of the husband's investments in aggregate did better than the market as a whole. Yes, his investment in Haloid/Xerox "ballooned," as you called it, and was a winner, but that doesn't tell us how his investments as a whole performed compared to the overall returns of the S&P 500.
Using my hypothetical example above of 5k invested in each of 20 stocks, but changing the starting the date to 1947, the midpoint between Haloid going public in 1936 and becoming Xerox in 1958, and the ending date to end of 1983, nine months before the publication of Kirby's article, then 100k of S&P 500 would have turned into $5.25M instead of the $3M in my original example. The S&P 500 overall was a 52 bagger during that time, and clearly the husband didn't bag 160 on everything that he bought. My point is simply that we can't tell whether the husband in aggregate exceeded the returns of the overall market. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. Kirby's tale of the husband's success with Haloid/Xerox just doesn't provide enough information to know. It's not uncommon, however, for investors to focus on (i.e., remember or talk about) only their big winners and conclude, often incorrectly, that they're beating the returns of the market as a whole.
Statistics: Posted by momopi — Sun Jun 02, 2024 11:25 pm — Replies 116 — Views 11395