What does it mean to own shares in a “street name”
QuestionI received from a reader: What does it mean to own shares in a “street name”
Some investors hold physical stock certificates; pieces of paper with their name on them that represent their ownership in a corporation. Other investors are invested in a DRIP, or dividend reinvestment program, and their shares are noted by the company’s registrar in an electronic journal; this is known as “book entry”. In both cases, the company can quickly and easily access the total number of shares you own and / or contact you directly.
The most popular holding form for most investors, however, is through a brokerage account or asset management account. When you buy shares of Coca-Cola or The Washington Post through your broker, they aren’t physically sitting in a vault with your name on them. Instead, the broker has them registered in its name; that is, Coke won’t know that you own the shares, it only sees that Schwab or Fidelity owns X number of shares. The brokers, in turn, track who owns what internally.
Can I Sue My Parent’s Broker? A Question from a Reader
Please forgive the rapidity with which this message is written – I’m preparing this week’s special feature on financial independence and wanted to respond given the nature of your email. Unfortunately, I’m not going to have time to go through and edit it so excuse me if it lacks eloquence.
Although it is generally a rule of thumb that the percentage of stocks invested in bonds should be equivalent to your age (i.e., a 70 year old would have 30% other assets such as stocks and 70% bonds), that is just a broad outline and doesn’t take into consideration the individual finances of people. Many seniors continue to have significant equity exposure if they have substantial assets, no need to live on them other than the dividends, and maintain a comfortable lifestyle. There are members of my own family that are around the same age that have near total equity exposure because they don’t need the funds for day-to-day expenses as a result of their pension income and social security checks so they focus on the long-term to maximize the value of the estate for those who will inherit after they’ve passed away.
The bigger concern is your focus on short-term market fluctuations. You are confusing volatility with value. Yes, Dow stocks have been hit hard this year. But time and time again, for more than one hundred and fifty years, blue chip equities, when bought on a diversified basis with dividends reinvested, have crushed every other asset class. In fact, at these lower prices, a very strong argument can be made for those who hold their stocks because the dividends that are being reinvested are purchasing far more shares due to depressed stock prices. You need to get a copy of Ivy League Wharton Professor Jeremy Siegel’s book, The Future for Investors: Why the Tried and True Beat the Bold and New. It will open your eyes. His research is magnificent. Stock prices are the greatest asset class for building wealth for the average man but the gains don’t come in gradually upward sloping markets. They are jagged ups, downs, sideways, drops, skyrockets, and more. Find a chart of the Dow over the past 100 years, though, and you’ll see even the Great Depression was a blip on the chart (when you factor in reinvested dividends, it was even smaller). Despite war, famine, the threat of nuclear annihilation, a Presidential assassination and resignation, the advent of the Internet, space travel, planes, trains, and automobiles, biomedicine, civil rights movements, and more, ownership of businesses has proven to be the most lucrative long-term proposition from someone looking to grow their capital. The ride is bumpy so it requires you to stick to your guns, buy quality, and ignore fluctuations! Otherwise, you’ll just be handing your hard earned money to professional traders and business men / women who buy for their own brokerage accounts.
Please understand that in most cases, when I get these types of letters, they seem to come from adult children with parents that have built up substantially more assets than they currently have. Many times, the sons and daughters are legitimately concerned about their parents, but equally as concerned about the value of any potential assets they will inherit. Yet they fail to realize that the very reason their parents often have money and they don’t is because mom and dad have diligently invested in high quality stocks for decades, ignoring market fluctuations and profiting from the well documented real growth in equity valuations on an after-inflation basis. What’s especially frustrating is that people often look at the high water mark of their portfolio and say they need to “get back to there.” Instead, they fail to realize that if they’ve been investing for long enough (say, 20 years), they already have many, many times (literally multiples) the money they would have had by parking it in bonds or the bank. Yet, even though they are richer on a net basis, they feel the psychological sting of a perceived paper loss. For professionals, it’s baffling because you’re still better off than you would have been. It’s like the people that sue a doctor who broke one of their ribs despite saving their life in a restaurant by performing the Heimlich maneuver.
What do you propose now? You seem to be suggesting that they sell out of their stocks and switch into more conservative investments at the very time when stocks appear to be the most attractively priced in many, many decades. I can’t offer you financial advice or give you any recommendations. All I can tell you is that the “super investors” such as Warren Buffett are pouring their personal resources into American stocks at this time, even going so far as to publicly declare it. Much of my personal capital came in the aftermath of the September 11th stock market crash when people panicked after massive drops, allowing me to buy up shares that I had been watching for years. I’ve invested more money in the past six months than I have in my entire life.
1. Continue to hold the blue chip stocks, reinvest the dividends, and let America, Inc. get stronger and more profitable just like it has for the past two hundred plus years. The stock market will eventually follow but when we get back to break even dow 14,000+/-, the portfolio value could be higher due to reinvested dividends. In fact, the longer the market stays at these levels, the better for both them and whoever will inherit their money. Dividend reinvestment is currently adding 7% to many top-name firms! That’s just unbelievable. Even if the stocks go nowhere for three years, you could have a compounded annual rate of return of roughly 22.5% over that time!
2. Suck up the loss, sell the portfolio holdings, and move to more conservative assets. When things calm down, you have no chance of recovering that money, however, because certificates of deposits and Treasury bills cannot keep pace with equity ownership over the long-run. It may be three months, it may be five years, but you will have to watch the value of stocks skyrocket as your account stays at the lower, permanent level you forced it into as a result of your asset sales. For some people, this is still the right call due to their emotional disposition and financial position. (If this were my aunt or grandmother asking, to sell out now – and park the money in accounts paying only 0.01% interest – especially when the United States is printing dollars to try to stave off the credit crisis (which will eventually lead to inflation) seems idiotic to me, but honestly if they need the money to live on, you don’t have a choice.)
I’m not a lawyer. What I can say is that based on my own opinion and the information you gave me, your parents would be wrong for claiming that the broker was at fault on a layman’s common-sense test. Could you get a settlement? I don’t know – maybe? But it seems like a fairly immoral thing to do given that you were willing to take all of the upside of the market yet when the inevitable volatility happens, want to lay blame off on a third party. It’s not like the broker was having them write naked puts or something (which would almost certainly be irresponsible for the situation you described).
My response, however, is predicated on your statement that they own high quality Dow Jones type stocks. If they are well-off, can live comfortably on their social security checks, and have a long history of investing in the stock market, all equity exposure could have been a perfectly reasonable and rational portfolio allocation. Stocks are not like a savings account. You can’t tell “how you’re doing” by looking at the statement each month. Instead, you take a 3-5 year rolling basis and, frankly, we are just now at the 2004 stock levels meaning that your family is just as well off now as they were a few years ago, plus they have the benefits of reinvested dividends so it’s highly likely that they are better off than if the money had been parked in a savings account. After all – what would have happened if your parents had sold out during the crash just before the original Gulf War in the 1990′s? Or the 1987 stock market crash? They’d be much, much poorer than they are today. You’re effectively suggesting they do the same thing now.
Take it for what it’s worth.
Pre Paid Achieve Card
The Achieve prepaid mastercard or prepaid credit card issued by Palm Desert National Bank is a is a credit card designed for those that have little or no credit or those that have had difficulty obtaining a unsecured prepaid credit card in the past.
Although the card does require a security deposit to be paid in advanced it is a great option for those looking to reestablish there credit. The credit card does have a onetime activation fee of 9.95 for processing and shipping or handling.
There is no interest applied on the account, no annual fee, and none of the other charges similarly found with most unsecured credit cards. There are also fewer credentials required in comparison to common unsecured credit cards, such as a no credit check policy, no employment verification, and so forth.
It is common for stored value cards to lack benefits; however, this card does offer automatic bill payment, direct deposit, these are great values that are added to the card so you can refill it at anytime without hassle and for free. It’s great for online purchases as well as an alternate way of paying monthly bills online since its refillable. Only you decided the amount or even know that it is a prepaid card
Therefore, those who are looking for a stored value card to pay in advance for purchases, do not mind paying upfront fees, and will take advantage of the reward program may find the Prepaid Visa Card, or prepaid debit card to be a beneficial option.
Getting Rich by Investing in an Excellent Business
At the annual meeting in 1996, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger commented that, “If you find three wonderful businesses in your life, you’ll get very rich.” At the meeting one year later, he said, “The single biggest recurring mistake I’ve made has been my reluctance to pay up for outstanding businesses.” As a new investor, you may here this and wonder, “Yes, Joshua, but what is it that actually makes a company an excellent business?”
To help you understand the traits of an excellent business, I’ve put together some resources that will give you an idea of what you should look for in a stock, and, just as vital, why it is important. Armed with this information, over time you’ll be more likely to build a portfolio of wealth creating assets that can provide financial security for you and your family.
An excellent business earns high returns on capital with little or no debt
There seems to be little doubt, based upon the evidence, that it’s easier to build a large net worth through value investing – that is, the disciplined purchase of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and other assets that appear to be selling at a substantial discount to a reasonable person’s estimate of intrinsic value (or “the real” value.) Think of it as if you knew a local car wash had gold buried underneath it. The proprietor might be asking $800,000 for the land and enterprise, but you know full well that you could pay substantially more, not only owning the business, but also selling the gold you dug up on the open market. Thus, you had reason to believe that it was being sold for far less than its intrinsic value.
The one major shortcoming of this approach is that an asset bought cheap must be sold when it reaches intrinsic value unless it is an excellent business. As Charlie Munger has pointed out, over long periods of time, the rate of return which an investor earns is likely to be very close to the total return on capital generated by a firm, adjusted for dilution in shares outstanding. Thus, you are likely to do better paying fair value for a business that can reinvest its capital at high rates of return – say, over 15% to 20% per annum – than buying a mediocre business trading at a small discount to its liquidation value.
For more information, read Business Like Investing: Thinking Like an Owner; on the second page of the article you’ll find information on why return on capital matters.
An excellent business has durable competitive advantages
If you had unlimited funds, do you really believe that with the best pick of any manager in the world, you could unseat Coca-Cola as the undisputed leader in the soft drink industry? How about Johnson & Johnson with its myriad of patents, trademarks, and brand name products? The reason these businesses are able to succeed so well is that they have durable competitive advantages – things that their competitors can’t reproduce.
Sometimes these advantages are easy to spot – as is the case of Coca-Cola, which is the second most recognized word on Earth. However, it is possible for them to remain buried. One of the secrets to the phenomenal success of Wal-Mart is that Sam Walton built a distribution system with logistical capabilities that allowed him to lower the transportation costs of moving merchandise to his stores, allowing him to make far more profit than competitors selling at higher prices. He and his fellow shareholders won from the increased income while consumers won from the lower prices. These forces worked in combination with one another, reinforcing and accelerating the results so much that the tiny five-and-dime grew into the largest retailer the world has ever seen.
When you buy into a company through the purchase of its common stock, try to identify the durable competitive advantages it has that could stand up from attack by competitors and market forces such as outsourcing and increased globalization.
An excellent business is scalable
When businesses are highly successful, one of the key ingredients more often than not is scalability. Take American Eagle Outfitters, which has one of the best long-term investment records over the past decade. Why was it successful? Target? Wal-Mart? McDonald’s? Coca-Cola? Pepsi? Microsoft? All are excellent businesses in part because they had products or services that could be replicated in cookie-cutter fashion very, very rapidly.
Think about it. The McDonald’s in Hong Kong is very much like the McDonald’s in Chicago. And New York. And Southern California. By having the menu, layout, fixtures, and technology packaged in a way that restaurants could be rapidly opened, it made it easier for the chain to roll out across the United States and world. Coupled with its relatively high returns on equity and the cash provided by the franchisees, which footed the bill to build a huge portion of the overall business, it’s not hard to see why the shareholders might consider Ray Kroc as a hero.
The price still matters …
For those of you too young to remember the Nifty Fifty, this idea of buying excellent businesses was taken to such ridiculous extremes in the 1960’s that investors paid upwards of sixty and seventy times earnings! To contrast, a normal price-to-earnings ratio on Wall Street is considered fifteen; that is, for every $1 in per share profit a company generates, it would trade for $15. It didn’t take a genius to see that even if the business was all it was cracked up to be, at those prices, it would be virtually impossible to earn a satisfactory long-term rate of return.
That’s why you need to take a moment to read Price is Paramount to see an illustration of how lower growth rates can actually lead to higher rates of return in certain circumstances.
What’s The Easiest Way to Track My Investments?
For years, my favorite way to track investments was Microsoft Money Premium, which let you monitor everything from your bank accounts to your 401(k). Microsoft announced in 2009, however, that it was discontinuing the product because they didn’t see a market for it anymore because hundreds of brokerage firms and banks are offering free tracking services online for clients, allowing them to see their net worth on one screen.
What’s a new investor to do? Let’s take a look at a few of the options now available if you want a simple, easy to understand way to track your investments.
The Online Options
Most top-tier financial institutions now offer tracking services online. Just to name one: Bank of America now has a feature that allows clients enter the username and password for their other accounts at institutions throughout the world, including retirement and brokerage accounts, and the Bank of America website will pull all of the data together on one screen so you can see your entire financial picture. You can even create manual entries to track loans from family members or other items that don’t show up on a regular statement.
The same is true at a start-up called Mint.com, which has reportedly won backing from Microsoft. Other brokers, such as Charles Schwab and E-Trade allow clients to review years of past records online in free, downloadable PDF format.
If you have only a handful of accounts and just want to know where you stand each month, these can be great choices that are, in most cases, completely free as part of your regular banking or investing relationship.
Using Microsoft Excel to Track Your Investments
A popular option among many investors is to use Microsoft Excel to track their accounts. By creating different tabs in a workbook, you can keep records for each individual account, and then aggregate them together, run different scenarios, and basically manipulate the figures any way you need to get an idea of how your financial life is going.
Using Excel to track your investments does require working knowledge of the program, but it is used in virtually every office in the world, there are millions of pages of books dedicated to teaching beginners how to use the program, and you likely have family members that can spend an afternoon showing you how to setup your file. For most people, it’s the best, and easiest, choice now that Microsoft Money has been removed from the picture.
Using QuickBooks to Track Your Investments
My personal favorite is the use of QuickBooks to track investments. We use it at several of the new companies we established in 2009, and it allows us to record anything that we need to in a matter of a few clicks, including really complicated stuff such as advanced stock option trades. The downside is that it requires a thorough understanding of accounting debits and credits, otherwise it could be overwhelming.
QuickBooks does offer a free online edition for beginners that you can download and begin using right away if your needs are simple. For most people or small businesses, it just may fit the bill – and at a price tag of $0, it certainly helps your budget.
Quicken and Other Options
There are several other options, including Quicken (some people love the program – I was never that into it but that is entirely personal preference) to track your investments. In an Internet-based world, it’s not difficult to find reviews of software packages so you can find one that works for you.
