Ewok126 wrote:3M has already contaminated the entire human existence.
They're an awesome stock (ticker symbol: MMM) for long-term buy-and-hold investing. They just raised their already-fat dividend another 6% this year, making this the 61st year in a row they've increased their dividend (they're a member of the "Dividend Kings", a short list of companies who have raised dividends annually for the last 50 years or more). They sell 60,000 different products in 70 countries.
Buy some MMM shares in a tax-deferred traditional IRA, or way better still, a tax-FREE Roth IRA, set the dividends to DRIP (Dividend Re-Investment Plan, meaning it automatically rolls all dividend payouts into buying more fractional shares), then forget about it and just go about your life for years while the compounding does its magic fully automatically and unattended. It's even better if you occasionally buy and add more shares manually, but it's not required. Years later, have a look at your share count and the total value. WOW!
"Contaminating the entire human existence" is a wee bit of an exaggeration, but they DO enable early retirement of lots of people, incuding yours truly!
(Another excellent such company is ticker JNJ, the Dividend King healthcare leviathan Johnson and Johnson. An awesome long-term DRIP stock, tons of products and a unique corporate structure containing over a hundred business sub-units that lets them shift money around from where the most is being generated, to where the most is needed... it's almost like a mutual fund inside a company!).
.
