The Ignorant Investor

I'm going to be straight with you here. This is a real memoir of my time owning J&J. There are no made up episodes in this story. No exaggerations like you find in “A Million Little Pieces.” I'm not going to say that once I bought it I took a bunch of drugs and beat up a cop and then spent time in jail before finding redemption in rehab when the truth is that I just bought it in 2001 and held it without incident for the next five years. Or that I pretended to be a cross-dressing homosexual prostitute with aides just so I could get people interested in this story of how I bought J&J and have made no money on it. Reality is dull, see? So this memoir is going to be dull. That’s the truth of it.

I'm not going to adopt the publishing industry's definition of the term "memoir", which apparently is synonymous with the word "lie." So much so, that bookstores should move what passes as memoir these days to an entirely separate rack. One that's placed between the racks for non-fiction and fiction. They can label that rack the "bullshit" rack, so when I go in and ask to read someone's highly popular autobiography about being a drug addict in rehab or a self-hating lesbian or the guy who ran the CIA prior to the invasion of Iraq, the clerk can tell me, "Oh, that book is over there with the rest of the self-promoting bullshit . . . yes, over by the coffee bar." Problem solved.

My story with J&J is very simple. I paid 60.75 per share in November of 2001. I don’t remember what attracted me to the company other than that it had a good reputation, was in the drug and medical products field, and has seen good growth in its share price over the previous decade (this is not a very exciting admission for a memoir, so let me do some editing here: the reason I bought J&J was because either because I was molested by a priest, or because I was an pale, quiet kid in high school who the other kids called “squirrely-bones” and who participated in satanic rituals with a group of homoerotic Baptists- either one will do).

I admit, the company seduced me with its solid profits, the pleasant dividend, the prospects for future growth that were, at least in public, respectable. But the stock has a dark side (bet you didn’t see that coming). Everything about this company is average. Average growth. Dull dividend. A profit picture that inspires no one. By owning this stock, I have touched the face of evil, and that face is my own. (make sense? Who cares- it sounds all literary and lyrical).

I’ve thought about my shares in J&J many times over the years. It’s hovered around 60 most of the time, sometimes going up a few bucks before falling back down. Every now and then I realized that my commitment to the stock was holding back my returns, and yet I just couldn’t abandon the relationship. Each time I came to understand that selling those shares was just what The Man wanted me to do. He didn't care about this half-black, half-Navajo, half-Chinese kid born into a working class brothel in Bangkok. Maybe owning J&J was my form of rebellion in a world that just didn’t care about me or try to understand my tortured soul. Forget trying to understand people like me, middle-class America, I said. You drive around in your SUVs and you listen to Coldplay on your I-pods, and go to Applebees and order your little basket of curly fries just like some deep-fried potato craving robots- and you've never once bothered to ask yourself why I, the ignorant investor who everyone laughed at in high school, bought J&J at 60.75. How do you live with yourselves, America?

Now it’s years later. J&J's stock price has tumbled below 58 over the past couple of days. I don’t know why. The company was locked in a battle with another maker to buy Guidant, and now that J&J has lost out on the bidding Wall Street seems determined to punish them for it, even though the conventional wisdom seemed to be the Guidant buy was an only so-so idea. Despite reporting improve earnings, Wall Street also didn’t like the company’s failure to increase revenues during the past quarter. It’s trading now around 18x earnings, just like the Dow (an index of which it’s a part), and I can’t live like this any more. What point is there going on owning J&J instead of shares in an index fund? I’m beyond the limits of human endurance here.

So I’m ready to trade my shares in J&J. Just end my relationship with this dull brute of a company that has psychically destroyed me during the time we’ve spent together with its failure to increase in value. Selling it is the only way I can regain my soul. I’ve hurt so many other people by owning it. My family, for one, who were expecting capital gains from the J&J trade to buy a new car. But maybe- just maybe- by selling it I can finally find the redemption I now know I’ve been seeking all these years with my drinking, my promiscuity, and my owning of individual stocks through my Smith Barney account.

Oprah- if you’re looking for a new memoir to tout- I’m here for you, baby. I’m here.