As a CPA and former Certified Financial Planner people often ask me for investment advice.  Please understand any advice given on my blog should be run by your investment and tax advisors prior to implementation.  Goes without saying, but I said it anyway.  My favorite question centers on what the best investment I ever made was.   My usual answer is Mr. Softy – Microsoft (msft).  It’s my favorite because my wife and I made a substantial investment in the company early in our marriage and held on for over twenty years.  This investment allows me to demonstrate risk and patience with the same investment.

In the early 90s not every desk had a computer on it and certainly most families had not yet purchased a home computer.  Though unless you were living in a cave you knew something of the Bill Gates story and recognized that personal computers were being purchased for office workers like crazy.  The reason I took the plunge was an article I read in a business periodical on hot Texas afternoon, more of a biography of Bill Gates really.  In the article he described how he had no intentions of getting into the pc business but rather wanted all of the pc manufacturers to use his software.  With every pc sold Microsoft would receive a royalty for its operating system.  As he explained it, there might be a dozen companies that fight it out in the pc marketplace, but it really didn’t matter to Microsoft who the winners were because they would win with every sale.  I bought his argument and a few days later purchased 100 shares of msft. Continue reading →