The best advice for anyone thinking of purchasing shares, whether in good economic times or bad, is to find a company that makes a product that people will always need or want no matter how bad it gets, a product they themselves can easily and fully understand, and preferably a product that they themselves use and believe in. Just as a salesperson must understand the product they sell in order to be sale to convince others of its value, a potential shareholder must also understand why on earth somebody would be interested in the product that a company sells. Don’t forget, though, that people still have a degree of need for both entertainment and to feel good about themselves no matter how bad things get. For instance, in the depression of the 1920s, and in more recent economic hard times,
Back from the brink of the oblivion of irrelevance in the late 1990s, Apple, Inc. (AAPL) has made a dramatic comeback over the last decade. Nowadays, and for quite awhile now, it seems like everyone has some sort of an iSomething. Apple will retain its momentum for quite some time not based on any feelings of goodwill the public may or may not have for the company surrounding demise of its brilliant leader, but instead on Apple’s world-renown attention to detail as NYT illustrates. The New York Times even ventures to speculate that Apple has filed numerous patents in Steve Jobs’ name purely for public relations reasons.
Boeing (BA) is selling not only its brand new 787s, but quite an assortment of other models and variations, like hot cakes. It should be challenging for anyone to imagine that large portions of the global population will cease their requirement for an airliner with which to travel large distances around the planet, especially since teleportation still seems quite a ways off. Boeing also has its hand in countless defense contracts and the space program. Boeing should also become more involved in space travel as that moves more into the private sector.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Visa (V) has staying power. You might associate the name and its corresponding logo with your monthly bill, late fees, high interest charges, and a lot of other grief in your life, but those things are actually functions of your bank. All Visa really does is help facilitate the transfer of funds from account A to account B in a safe, secure manner, no matter where in the world or in which institutions those accounts reside. Tens of thousands of credit and debit transactions happen every second of every day and this company gets a tiny piece of it each time.