Today we have the uncertain pleasure of checking out a teaser pitch from James Altucher, who one of our readers referred to as the “white Don King of the stock gurus” — he’s peddling subscriptions to Altucher’s Investment Network (that’s his “entry level” letter, $79/year), and the bait he dangles out is his “special report” entitled “Weed-tirement: The Key to a Seven-Figure Pot Pension in the 21st Century.”
Altucher gives me more of a headache than most of the promo-kings, but several readers have asked about this one, and the furor over anything marijuana-related seems to be unquenchable (which is why, of course, the newsletters keep coming out with new weed-related stock picks), so we’ll have a quick look for you today and see what this “Weed-tirement” idea is…
Here’s the lead-in to the pitch:
“Urgent: June 13th Deadline Approaching!
‘Weed-tirement’
“Learn how this massive payout planโฆ
“Offered by the most profitable company in marijuanaโฆ
“Could double your retirement savings starting with as little asโฆ $50
“Wall Street will not advertise it.
“Your 401(k) canโt compete with it.”
So what is it? More from the ad…
“Did you know that ordinary Americans can legally access an almost unheard of โsecretโ plan that could allow anyone to retire rich from marijuana?
“And even though itโs got nothing at all to do with the governmentโฆ
“This plan is much safer compared to other investment strategies.
“This 100% fully legal plan could be your ticket to financial independence, once and for all, using a strategy that goes back over 40 yearsโฆ”
Huh? We know there was no legal “weed” investing back in the 1960s and 1970s… we weren’t far removed from “reefer madness” back then. So what is he talking about when he says that “just a single dollar in what I now call ‘Weed-tirement’ could have grown into $6,638 by 2015?”
Must be something that was not weed-related before, but somehow is now… right? Let’s get into the clues:
“With a tiny initial commitment of less than $100โฆ
“You could be on your way to receiving regular payments that start adding up to $10,000, $20,000 or more every year.
“And over the long run, simply by participating, you could even be seeing payments adding up to six figures each and every year!
“The best part about this alternative investment program is it works the same way a 401(k) fund does.
“But you donโt have to wait 20 years or more to start seeing the results.”
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OK, fine, so what is it?
“It all works by tapping into the revenue of one of the most profitable companies ever to enter the marijuana trade.”
Ah, OK. So that almost certainly means we’re talking about one of the large companies that has begun to invest in marijuana… but that also has been around for a long time and, I’m guessing from the “payout” talk, pays a solid dividend. That narrows it down quite a bit.
What else? We get some hints about folks who are already collecting payments…
“It took a little digging around, but I found some people who are already benefitting from it.
“Theyโre picking up payments that arrive like clockwork.
“People like 58-year-old Jenny Skeine, from Nevada. She collected an extraordinary payment of $4,587.20 in early January.
“And another for the same amount in April.
“55-year-old Norman Markum, from Delaware, got his scheduled payments for $7,380 in January and April too.”
And the near-term urgency:
“And with the next scheduled payment set to arrive on July 10โฆ
“If you registered and contributed to this plan today, youโd be about to receive your first payment too.”
At least he talks about “contributing” to the plan, and about how your payouts will be determined by the amount you invest — so many of these kinds of ads imply that the dividends you receive are somehow a “payout” that you can just “enroll” to receive, and gloss over the fact that you have to put money at risk to make a share of corporate profits.
So what is the investment in “Weed-tirement” all about? More from Altucher:
“The contributors to ‘Weed-tirement’ just committed almost $2 billion to marijuana growing operations.
“And theyโre about to throw another $1.05 billion in to boot.
“This is why this plan is available to anyone looking to make real money off of the explosive growth in the demand for marijuana.”
And we’re told that this company has been “constantly expanding and diversifying” for years, but that they raise money for it with an “alternative investment plan” that pays out such extremely high returns that it “seems ‘too good to be true.'”
This clearly has something to do with compounding, here’s more of the tease:
“Payments this size four times every year, year in and year out, can stack into seven figures much faster than any comparable retirement plan could deliver.
“And if youโre willing to stick with it over the long termโฆ
“Youโre looking at an investment vehicle delivering five times the return a standard 401(k) would as youโre nearing retirement.
“‘Think of [the plan] like a snowball,’ says Brannon Lambert, an independent financial advisor at Canvasback Wealth Management in Raleigh, North Carolina.
‘The larger it grows, the more it feeds itself. The more it feeds itself, the more it grows.'”
Sheesh, I’m not used to seeing Altucher wearing his “reasonable” hat, but he actually said “long term,” and described the process of compounding dividend returns pretty well.
And one last hint for you:
“In 2017 the ‘Weed-tirement Plan’ shared a total of $4,807,000,000 with people already enrolled in the strategy.
“No, I didnโt ‘add on extra zeroes.’
“This is the very real power this plan has.
“In fact, in 2018 the total payout to active plan members grew to almost $5.4 billion.”
OK… so what is “Weed-tirement?” Thinkolator says that Altucher is just teasing shares of Altria (MO), the maker of Marlboro cigarettes and, yes, a company that is investing in Canadian marijuana and otherwise gradually diversifying away from cigarettes (including into smokeless tobacco and nicotine delivery systems, like Juul vape equipment and On! nicotine pouches).
And the “special” aspect of the investment is likely just direct DRIP investing in Altria. Like many larger companies, Altria offers direct share purchase and direct dividend investment without using a broker — these are usually called Direct Share Purchase Plans (DSPP) and Dividend ReInvestment Plans (DRIP), and they can be a reasonable way for shareholders to gradually build positions in dividend-paying companies… mostly because they often have fees that are below typical brokerage commissions (though not always — sometimes they’re higher, and the value of direct DRIP plans is far less obvious now, in the era of low-cost brokers who offer free dividend reinvestment, than it was when most people were stuck with high-cost full-service brokers). Computershare’s website seems to be down for the moment for some reason, so I haven’t checked the details — but they often don’t charge fees if you commit to buying, say, $200 a month worth of shares and letting the dividends compound.
A DSPP can also make it a little easier to have some “buy and hold” discipline, mostly because it just adds some friction — it’s a little harder and slower to transfer money in and out and sell your shares than it is with a typical broker, who is incentivized to get you to make more transactions, so it might make you more patient and less likely to try to time the market.
But absent that discipline, the real benefit of a DSPP is the ability to build a position in a single stock with regular dollar amounts each month or quarter, including fractional shares, and to have it on “autopilot” (so your $200 might buy 4.06 shares this month since the price is $49.18 per share, then if the stock drops to $42 next month your $200 would buy 4.76 shares, you end up with 8.82 shares instead of the “8 shares plus cash” you would have if using Robinhood or another discount/free broker, which means compounding works slightly faster). I don’t know if Altria’s plan offers this, but it probably does.
And yes, June 13 is a real deadline — though it’s actually June 12. The stock will begin to trade ex-dividend on June 13… that means “without the dividend,” so those who own the stock on June 12 will receive the 80 cent dividend for this quarter, those who buy it on June 13 will not get the dividend. The stock always opens lower on ex-dividend day to reflect that 80 cents, but where it trades after that will depend, of course, on investor sentiment. Dividends are taxable so, all else being equal, you’re better off buying the day after a regular dividend than the day before, even with lower dividend tax rates, but for regular quarterly dividends the impact is very minor… the gains come from letting those dividends get reinvested into new shares, compounding returns for many years as the dividend and the share price rise over time, assuming that both do rise, not from catching a particular quarter’s payout.
As to the company itself, well, my opinion hasn’t changed in the last five months — Altria was teased as a dividend darling by Cabot back in January, and other than some news about the continuing decline in US cigarette sales and the talk about increasing the tobacco purchase age to 21, the story hasn’t really changed much and the price and valuation are almost identical… so I’ll just re-share what I wrote about them then:
Altria has been probably the single best investment for the market in the past 75 years… at least, the best “regular” stock that didn’t emerge from nowhere and go bonkers, like Netflix (NFLX) or Amazon (AMZN). That outperformance has continued even in the much-more-regulated modern era for cigarettes, here’s what the chart looks like for Altria’s total return compared to the market over the past 20 years (compared to the S&P 500 and a couple utility and consumer staples ETFs):
MO Total Return Price data by YCharts
I’m not willing to own tobacco companies directly (I’m sure I have some in my mutual funds), and I can’t say that their recent decision to invest heavily in Juul Labs has me feeling any better about them, personally, but MO has certainly been a fantastic long-term investment.
Will that continue as smoking continues to fall? Well, that probably depends more on whether vaping becomes (even more) mainstream and keeps some of that nice fat profit margin for them, since nicotine addicts can be profitable customers whether they’re burning or vaporizing the stuff, or on whether they’re able to lever their way in to build or buy some big brands in marijuana, as I’d guess they would very much like to do (they’ve already agreed to buy 45% of the Canadian marijuana company Cronos (CRON) for $1.8 billion… with, somewhat like Constellation’s (STX) agreement with Canopy Group (CGC), the possibility of getting a controlling stake in the future with warrants).
They have been facing a long slow decline in smoking rates for decades, and massive taxation, but have also been able to raise prices to levels that we would have considered absurd 20 years ago — and enough people keep smoking to keep the cash register ringing quite nicely for them, so I don’t really know where the seesaw begins to pivot. Does the recent weak performance, and the regulatory backlash against Juul, mean that they’ve topped out and won’t be able to keep increasing cash flow? Or is this just another stumble for a dominant business that serves brand-loyal addicts? That’s the question I’d be asking about MO, but it’s also a question I would have been answering incorrectly over at least the past decade, to my financial detriment, so you might want to form your own opinion on this one.
Altria does have wine and beer investments — they own a wine business that’s essentially a rounding error on the income statement, and they still own about 10% of Anheuser Busch/Inbev (BUD) — but unless they decide to sell those BUD shares in a hurry the rise and fall of earnings will continue to be dominated by their dominant brands in cigarettes (Marlboro, with a 43% market share in the US, light years beyond everyone else) and in smokeless tobacco (Copenhagen and Skoal, which together have about 50% of the super-gross spitting market — yes, if you’re a chewer I still love you, and I’ll take that over your smoke going into my lungs, but that spitting in a cup thing is disgusting).
That dramatic outperformance over the past 20 years obscures the tough time Altria has had over the past year and a half, so here’s a shorter-term look, just for some perspective:
I would assume that the returns for Altria will be fueled largely by the dividend going forward, and it does yield about 6%, so that gives you a better entry point than you would have seen a year or two ago… and the trend is still improving in the major criteria that impact dividends. This chart shows the past nine years (including the first few months of 2009 obscured things a bit, so I cut them off), including the share price (blue), dividend per share (orange), operating income (green), and share count (red):
So as of the past few years, the dividend keeps rising, the operating income keeps rising, and the share count keeps falling… that helps the per-share dividend and earnings numbers to look better, and it begins to look as though the fall in sentiment about Altria is really just the share price coming back to earth and returning to the trend line established by their dividend growth. Long-term debt has risen a little, but is still only about $13 billion (versus a $90 billion market cap), and the debt service so far seems to be easily covered (they spent $5 billion a year just on their dividend, the debt costs them a lot less than that).
My best guess is that Altria’s share price will track its dividend growth over the next few years — and given their fairly aggressive dividend growth history, that probably means the stock has a decent chance of 10-15% annual returns… assuming that enough people keep smoking and vaping and chewing to keep their revenue flat or maybe even growing by a percent or two, and that they can keep raising prices to increase earnings. Even if Juul and Cronos do really well, they aren’t likely to massively change the income prospects anytime soon — their revenue is just so small in comparison to Altria’s core cigarette business, though Juul has certainly had some phenomenal growth to date.
What’s not to like, really, except for the fact that it’s largely a tobacco company and I won’t buy those, and except for the still-hefty regulatory risk as the vaping products, one of their major growth hopes, come under pressure from the FDA (which recently pushed to restrict the fun flavors of vape “juice” because kids, for some reason, were attracted to cotton candy and gummy bear flavors of nicotine)… though if there’s a company that has come through intense government regulatory pressure (and societal backlash) stronger than Altria has, at least in profit terms, I can’t think of it — Facebook (FB) might want to be taking notes here.
Not much of a “secret,” as you might note, since Altria and its tobacco peers have been among the best performing stocks, with Altria really leading the pack for most of modern history, and they do pay a very visible and high dividend and the headlines abound about Altria trying to get into the marijuana business to hopefully build that “Marlboro of Marijuana” brand in the future.
And yes, if Altria continues to grow at least a little bit — or even if stagnation settles in — then Altria shareholders who reinvest their dividends will continue to do very well as those large dividends compound and their money makes more money. It’s not magical, a 6% yield doesn’t mean you can save your retirement by investing $50 in a share of Altria today, but a high and growing dividend, combined with dividend reinvestment and a plan to invest more money on a regular basis for the long term, can indeed work wonders if you are lucky enough to choose a company that can thrive for 20 or 30 years… and patient enough to let that compounding work without getting in the way. There are good reasons why every broker tells you that “past performance does not guarantee future results,” but it is, at least, very true that Altria has just about the best “past performance” of any stock you could imagine over the long run.
And with that, dear friends, I’ll leave it to you — like Altria as a play on marijuana for your “Weed-tirement?” Prefer to avoid the sector, or like other stocks for DRIP investing? Are you more of a penny weed stock gambler, with favorites to share in that space? Let us know with a comment below.
Disclosure: I own shares of Facebook and Amazon, mentioned above. I do not own shares of any other stock covered, and will not trade in any stock covered for at least three days, per Stock Gumshoe’s rules.
Travis, I totally agree with your last statement, that you are not interested in owning cigarette stocks. They also own a portion of AB In/Bev, and Juule, which are products I personally would never touch. Although it may be a good investment money-wise, some people have a conscience as to the business of the company, and my conscience says “No Way”.
I have a conscience also , and I have never smoked , used drugs or have a tattoo, but I realize that you cannot stop the individuals who utilize those vices. Lord knows how many programs have been created to curtail those vices,. Having said that my conscience is not guilt pained by purchasing Phillip Morris MO stock!
It’s not a vice –“an immoral or wicked personal characteristic.” It’s a habit. It’s a consumption preference. The sales technique of financial newsletter publishers is a vice.
I must be some ‘piece of work’..I smoke, use drugs (legally) AND I have a tattoo. I would think that I’m ‘more to be pitied than censored’…but I’ll still claim my seat in heaven for taking care of my mother for 17 years. I guess I’ll see you there?
Dear mona123
Sorry, mona, you won’t see me there I have only met two (2) other people that agree with me. Once I’m dead I’m dead, but I’m going to request to be buried 15′ underground. So it’s a little harder for my soul to get out. Once I go I want to continue sleeping, you never seem to get enough while I have been alive. Just sleep. I know if I’m thinking again it’s going to be stressful and I’m through with thinking. I know someone is going to say, you don’t think stressful when you come back alive. If I’m thinking I will return to the stock market. And theres no way anyone can tell me different.
Thank :-: You
FRANK eight MORRISS
Should we also say no way to all the tax money that these vices bring in?
What about all the great jobs created?
To that I say, no way.
However, I respect your right to pass on these stocks.
I’m surprised that our old buddy Lichtenfeld over at the O’Club hasn’t rolled this one into his “100% Returns Every Year” (after 5 years via high-dividend-growth stocks PLUS buy-and-hold DRIP investing) as the #1 MJ stock to own!
Maybe he has a conscience too??
Smokers and junkies cost us HUGE amounts of money in unrecoverable medical expenses every year. Literally I’d wager, many Trillions of dollars. TAX DOLLARS. I saw an indigent smoker leave the hospital with a bill of $450,000 in 1995! If I can recover a fraction of my tax dollars from their addiction – that they will feed at any cost anyway, regardless of my involvement – bring it on! I am not profiting, they take far more from each of our pockets. I’m hedging my losses…
What’s the problem — socialism or smoking? I’ll bet you support Bernie Sanders.
Idiot. You missed the point completely. The problem is government healthcare and smoking. Free market healthcare and allowing people to go to hell in their own hand-basket – and foot the consequences for their own decisions – is the point. Besides of course pointing out investing in ‘sin’ markets does not encourage sin, it just recoups a bit of what we are forced to pay for other peoples bad choices. I’ll bet you support AOC.
Settle down, sweetheart. Don’t resort to ad hominem. Try to write grammatically correct, if your anger permits.
Oh, and is the problem socialized medicine? It seems to me that under a non-socialized system, you can do what you want — bear the costs and benefits — and it won’t cost your neighbor a dime
Introspection:get some.
Jami; Courtesy and manners: get some. Why do people like you always resort to name calling when someone states an opinion with which you don’t agree? Go throw your tantrum on some political blog.
Socialists and all other control freaks only want freedom for themselves, not others.
Calm down Americans. This isn’t a political forum.
Joe E. Agree w the other commenters. Resort to name calling and correcting grammar mistakes. Mr T s tweets are riddled with spelling/grammar mistakes. I would guess you don’t correct him?
Go to Fox comments section,, they will love you.. We have other priorities here.
Dear Wombat,
Do you think Travis or Steve should block Mr. T for his riddled comments???
Thank :-: You
FRANK eight MORRISS
REALLY! Calling someone an โidiotโ is not a productive way to discuss anything. Letโs try to stay on topic. Personal assaults will not get us to where we want to go, that being is this a sound investment or not.
LOL! Ditto on the Bernie comment. One thing Altria shows is that companies that are regulated are still immensely successful
Judging from your ratings on this post, many here do like Bernie. ๐
Altria is a great business. The fact that some won’t invest in it because they sell tobacco, alcohol and cannabis means that it has a lower than warranted valuation. That means it will likely have (as it always has had) higher than normal returns.
Smokers are going to smoke and drinkers are going to drink. Healthcare is always going to be a disaster. The government is always going to screw things up and charge you for it.
If anything, the fact that you are going to get stuck paying for healthcare through higher taxes and higher insurance rates should drive you to buy a stock like Altria that will give you a great return and allow you to afford to pay your share of those problems ;).
I hate to upset your belief system but from the tobacco farms to the truckers and production plants and all their taxes then on top of it the monstrous sales taxes, smokers contribute hundreds of millions of dollars a day to your economy. Why do you think they don’t just outlaw it?
You got it backwards. It is the prohibitionists that cost us HUGE amounts of money. You are also confused about who is responsible for the costs of socialized medicine . Those who are responsible are the socialists. By the way, the purpose of words like “junkies” is to dehumanize and provide scapegoats for those who are too dumb to think for themselves.
Here are some more facts. The major drugs in the world — alcohol, cannabis, opiates, and cocaine — are valuable medicines which have served mankind for thousands of years. These medicinal plants and extracts are also the safest drugs. Preparations of alcohol, cannabis, opium, and coca have been safely produced and consumed for centuries. These much-valued herbal medicines also have religious, ceremonial, and recreational uses. They belong in every home and medicine kit unless the homeowner chooses otherwise.
Plant-based drugs such as cannabis, opiates, and cocaine are currently illegal because they cannot be patented. They are illegal because they can be produced and sold for pennies by poor people such as peasant farmers. They are illegal because the biological action of every prescription drug can be duplicated with medicinal plants, extracts, and dietary supplements that are much safer, more effective, and much cheaper. In a free market where everyone, including poor people, are allowed to compete, basic medicines (drugs) would be dirt cheap. Big Pharma (the government licensed drug cartel) would lose more than ninety percent of their sales amounting to several hundred billion dollars per year. That is the reason why government drug fighters are employed to arrest millions of consumers who prefer natural drugs or choose not to be ripped off by Big Pharma. Money is the reason why government thugs are employed to murder peasant farmers and spray poison on their land, livestock, crops, and families. In fact, the medical industrial complex purchases tons of opiates every year from selected peasant farmers and resell them by prescription for more than a thousand times what they paid. The prescription drug racket is the most profitable racket in history enforced by armies of police and a vast prison complex.
The drug war is now a one trillion dollar per year armed robbery that enriches Big Pharma and the police-prison industrial complex at the expense of taxpayers and consumers. It is the largest armed robbery in history.
By the way, all accidental overdoses are caused by the adulterated, improperly labeled, and improperly manufactured drugs produced by the current illegalization war. For example, pure opiates such as morphine and its analog diacetylmorphine (heroin) packaged in safe doses are 100% safe. It is impossible to accidentally overdose on properly labeled drugs that are packaged in safe doses just like it is impossible to accidentally jump off a tall building or accidentally swallow twenty pills instead of one or two. Freedom_First(at)verizon(dot)net
agree…..and so it is for GMO crops and Monsanto……wanting to control our food supply. And if you live in a remote area and live off the land, you risk being sacrificed…. used you as a guinea pig ( marshall islands ). Grow your own pot!
The trouble is that curtailing smoking for valid health reasons has in part resulted in an epidemic of obesity – all that oral gratification craving had to go somewhere, and it has mostly gone to food, made worse by increasing proportions of take away and junk food. So we will see huge and increasing health impacts from diabetes, heart disease and some forms of cancer. Net benefit? Not so sure.
Travis, can you look into the teaser from Ian Wyatt about the 5 new marijuana IPO’s he is touting, if you by his $1,700 newsletter.
Im still holding bags from Ian Wyatts picks last year- bought the day he recommended Sproutly and Choom. Still holding. Buyer beware of Ian Wyatts picks.
Feel like there are still too many unknowns with the e-cigarettes. Sitting in the dental chair, getting a periodic cleaning, somehow the hygienist and I started talking about this same subject. She stated the the dental office has seen a significant increase in patient’s tooth decay caused by the smokeless e-cigs. Even though it’s much more tolerable to be around someone puffing vapor than burning tobacco, there’s still going to be health issues of some kind to the user. Also, in my area the minimum age to purchase has increased to 21.
To add, have a family member working for Phillip Morris. Says the smokeless cigarettes have been in use longer in Europe, are well accepted and he’s putting his money into PM. Looks like P/E and Div are only slightly worse than MO. With heavy investments being made and limitless possibilities for vapor filler content, this could be around a while. Just remember to brush. ๐
Peaks & valleys for over 30 yrs., but the divy looks like gravy!!! At least the company stays in it’s lane as they say!!!
My “qualms” about buying tobacco stocks didn’t stop me from purchasing a CEF that held a stake in MO. Nor did it stop me from investing in CRON a few weeks before MO announced they were buying into that company. Both investments made me decent money and money has no conscience. If you get all touchy-feely in the Stock Market you will miss opportunities.
I think You are as much right as the others thinking different, we are free to think as we want as long we donยดt forcรฉ others to think the contrary “live and let live” I neither smock nor drink, but others arround me do and no problem
Well I started DRIP back in the 1980’s and it was one of my best investment until the last few years and thinking about selling before it drops more.
It has been a wild ride.
MO decided to spin of KHC and then KHC decided to spin of MDLZ
In the meantime Mo split up into 2 companies with PM(the international part of the company)
I’m writing all of this from memory so hopefully it is correct.
In conclusion I was and am very well pleased with MO.
Hi Travis
On and off, Ive been reading/entertained here for years. You clearly love the cut and thrust of trading and interpreting the machinations of the market and the way teaser writers mangle the truth; but for those that just want a reasonable ‘safe’ bank-like profit without the risk of individual crashes, would you agree that some sort of s&P tracker is the best route.
BTW I started smoking 55 yrs ago and recently gave up (it was astonishingly easy; tobacco companies just tell you its hard so you dont try) I now consider the worst mistake I ever made in my life was taking that first puff.
I respect anyoneโs right to invest, or not, in any stock, etc, but my first thought is what is the difference between investing in a cigarette company versus a Cannabis or alcohol company. I donโt see cigarettes as an evil entity, just a personal preference. Letโs face it, there are hundreds of so called โvicesโ relating one way or another to successful and unsuccessful equities in the markets. I am subscribed to this newsletter not to enhance my moral values, but to get accurate information on the realities of truth in investing. Is this a sound investment strategy, or not.
We all have opinions about investing and apparently there must be individuals investing in this organization or they would not be as successful as they are. I didnโt realize that Stockgumshoe was a nonsmoking research vehicle. I am much more concerned about investment facts than I am in pressuring individuals in behaving in a certain manner.
Like I said, everyone has an opinion. I would just like to hear others opinions on the validity of this investment, not on moral grounds but on the strength of this particular investment.
Quite a bit of rancor here! I guess that shouldn’t surprise in this climate, every topic seems to generate anger and a leap to conclusions, particularly when it comes to other peoples’ motivation or political leanings.
That’s a bit silly, any time you feel the urge to accuse someone of being a socialist or a nazi, take some time and look in the mirror first. If your initial reaction is, “I bet you’re a XXXX,” then don’t bother polluting the comment thread — that’s not helpful. If your reaction is, “I disagree, I think XXXX” then that’s great and we’d love to hear it. Please discuss your view of a topic or a stock or whatever it is that you think is important, not your assumptions or accusations about the views of another person. No one cares what you think of another commenter, you can take to Twitter if that’s what makes your typing time worthwhile, but we might learn something from what you think about an issue or an investment.
When it comes to tobacco, I don’t really care whether or not you personally want to own tobacco stocks. I write from my personal perspective, that’s why I made it clear that Altria (MO) has been a great investment and I’ve not participated in it, and that’s OK with me. I consider tobacco to be far worse than alcohol mostly because I grew up during the secondhand-smoke era, when I had to tolerate cigarette smoke in cars, planes, restaurants and other places, and when I walk by someone sitting on a park bench smoking I am reflexively a little angry that I have to smell that smoke and breathe their pollutants. It’s not necessarily rational, there are other products that have major public impact and maybe you consider them worse, or think that anything goes, that’s fine — we all have our own personal biases, and not wanting to get involved in cigarette companies (or smell cigarette smoke, ever) is one of mine.
discussion vs rancour. Now theres a subject worth reading
Years ago my ex refused to buy tobacco stocks for the same moral reason, which I understand and respect. All it does is lost profit for years. After the divorce, I finally got in around high 30s and added more after it dropped from 70s to high 50s.
As long as we hold S&P or large cap mutual funds, we indirectly hold tobacco stocks. Tobacco is terrible to humans’ health, just as much as Monsanto’s poison to humans and the environment, or big pharma’s poison which causes so many death. Where do we draw the line? Nevertheless I respect your opinion Travis and others for not owning the stock individually.
We are still allowed to ‘think , learn and make choices, mistakes of our choosing! Each is allowed that for now!
Everything has consequences. Wind turbines kill birds, solar uses land that could be used for food, the list goes on too. One cannot just point to oil or pot or legal drugs etc. I do not think there is anything that humans develop that doesn’t negatively affect something else. We are the only true pest of the earth…..
I’m surprised that nobody has brought up the ‘offense’ industry, oops I mean the ‘defense’ industry, as an immoral investment.
If anything has been a moral failing of our nation, it is, IMO, our failure to heed President Eisenhower’s warning about the military industrial complex and its destructive powers.
We have allowed them to have their way. I think our dissent ended with the ending of the draft.
Most Americans are no longer directly effected by our nation’s ongoing wars abroad, yet vast profits have been gained by those who choose to invest in same.
It appears the legendary can of worms has been replaced by a can of tobacco…
Wow, so much hate spewing from this thread! The “big money” and newsletters LOVE to trade this hatred. This is the 3rd pitch for MO that I’ve seen here on Gumshoe just this year: Cabot in January, Stansberry in May (under Reader-Started Discussion) and now Altucher. In fact, Altria is a Stansberry favorite, calling it an “uncorrelated gem” — i.e. a stock that plunges due to reasons other than market forces, such as public sentiment or a temporary disaster which can be fixed. As for MO partnering with CRON and JUUL, that’s future gravy for these institutions. Why should we care what institutions think? Because they’re the big money that moves the market; retail portfolios like ours are merely piggybacking or falling off the wagon based on their movements.
I invested in Pharmaceilo as my weed stock along with the MJ ETF. Neither has done much. I think the hoopla is over. I liked the growing conditions in Columbia as opposed to Canada, much more efficient using natural sun, no need for heat, plenty of rain.
Smoke or don’t smoke, invest or don’t invest- your choice, thats what makes America great. Sometimes I think America has lost the ability of tolerate, which is a shame. From Washington to Main St. one cannot be black and white in a world that’s gray
Travis I can’t understand the anger in some of these posts.
I would never disrespect your website which is about investing not someone’s person beliefs.
Thanks you Travis for you revealing work.
Such a bummer, this MO!!! Why does the best stock also have to be morally a wrong one to own!?? What are some other stocks with similar growth and dividend over long term, that are not so guilt-inducing, Travis?
Altria and Philip Morris are in a class by themselves, largely because they have such a long history. What will be the next ones? That’s a good question, the Dividend Aristocrats list is probably a good place to start looking for those future stars — those are the companies who have increased their dividend at least once a year for at least 25 years, there are lots of sources for that list but SureDividend compiles them here: https://www.suredividend.com/dividend-aristocrats-list/
Wow what’s with all the vitriol? Our primary function here is too exchange information about stocks that have been successful for you, and not to lock A-Holes!
jesus, is this a stock discussion board or an e-pissing contest. take all this other garbage back to the troll hole you crawled out of.
altria is a $50 stock selling some products that can give people cancer, mo invested in lxrp which has some great patents about nicotine absorption, there are some good multistate operators like curaleaf bringing a wide range of cannabis products to different states, mo like constellation has money, some of the people that write what i call pavlovian greed articles short the stocks or have a personal interest in it doing well, we must separate pump and dump from serious hold long term