In its 2009 annual review the management of Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) explained the importance of trademarked Coke products to the overall operation. The short version: Trademark Coca-Cola is the profit engine that propels everything else. (“Trademark Coca-Cola” is a term used by management to refer to the product category that includes the Coca-Cola Classic beverage and variants thereof (e.g. Diet…

Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG), owner of the Gillette shaving empire, has had a tough time of things recently. In fact its share price struggles have been going on for about five years now (back in the spring of 2013 you’d have found the stock trading at roughly the same $80 it does today). Underpinning that underwhelming performance has been…

Growth is not a word that you would normally associated with AT&T (NYSE: T). I mean over the last decade earnings-per-share growth has been non-existent in real terms. Back in 2007 the company made around $2.75 per share in after-tax profit. As of last year that figure had only grown to about $3.05. For a lot of folks that statistic…

Buried way down on page 102 of the December 1992 edition of Black Enterprise magazine is an article titled The Power Of Investing In What You Know. It starts by listing some of the greatest consumer products of the past century – think Coca-Cola Classic, Heinz Ketchup and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes – before discussing the merits of investing in well known consumer…

The Southern states of the U.S. hold some truly great stories of the riches created by investments in Coca-Cola stock. In one of my first posts on the site I went over the legendary tale of Quincy, Florida, where back in the early 1920s a group of tobacco farmers invested their profits into the newly IPO’d Coke on the enthusiastic…

There is a great chapter in Of Permanent Value: The Story Of Warren Buffett that touches on his experience with McDonald’s – both the business and the stock. I don’t want to lift too much from the book, though suffice to say it is a wonderful little story that starts out with Buffett, Bill Gates and a McDonald’s outlet in Hong Kong…

I’ve received a couple of emails in recent months asking about big tobacco stock valuations. I guess a lot of folks have been looking at their stock price charts recently! Anyway, the headline numbers are certainly eye-opining. Altria (NYSE: MO) stock, for example, has lost around 25% from its 2017 peak. Philip Morris International has lost a meaty 33% over roughly…

Occasionally on the site I like to profile real life dividend millionaires. The cases that I find most interesting are those drawn from the lower and middle-income brackets: folks like Margaret Dickson, Paul Navone, Ronald Read and Anne Scheiber. The case of Agnes Plumb is a slightly different one, but before I get on to that let’s start with some…