John Lennon on Stocks
I was thinking about a John Lennon’s stock market advice the other day. Well not really. But I was thinking about the song “Imagine” and the line about imaging no possessions. I thought instead about “Imagine there’s no stock market, I wonder if you can”.
Imagine if there wasn’t a stock market? I’m not suggesting that stocks go away. Just the whole ‘stock market’ and particularly the indices. No Wall Street Journal (because no Wall Street). No S&P500. No day trading (because no brokers). No CNBC. And no Jim Cramer. No one shouting and jumping up and down. We’d know about what’s going on with the companies, but not about daily stock prices. Not until we called up the stock dealer to tell them we wanted to sell. We wouldn’t get a quote any more often then we’d get one for our McDonald’s franchise. We’d own part of a business, collecting our dividends and following our company through it’s financial reports. We’d only get a price when we were serious about selling.
Imagine how much calmer the whole stock investing process would be. We’d be buying our stocks like we’d buy part of any business. Current price? What difference does it make if we’re not planning on selling for 20 years? We certainly wouldn’t talk about ‘losing money’ because someone sold a share of our business for less than another person got 6 months ago (but isn’t that what many people call a loss in a stock?).
John Lennon wrote the song “Imagine” about his idea of an idyllic world. But considering he was far from being a pauper, he might have liked our imagined world of peace, serenity and long term profits.