FMC $63.47
Sometimes when you go with what your heart tells you, it can be the biggest mistake. Such is FMC stock!
My dad who passed away several years ago now was a professor at Rutgers University in the agricultural school, working in the extension department. That meant that he spent a lot of time testing chemicals used in farm fields to check effectiveness and safety. I spent many happy hours with my dad in the lab preparing solutions and then putting out test plots on various farms around the state and reading the results.
I came across FMC who makes chemicals for the farm industry. These are put out on crops to prevent mold, insect damage and weed control. As a little nod to dad, I had to buy some of this stock.
It was December 2023, and the farming season was about to start soon, so I figured it would be soon that FMC’s sales would go up, and hopefully the stock too. Turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong!
Having just gone through a worldwide pandemic, a lot of people had done panic buying. Remember the Toilet Paper situation? Well, it wasn’t just toilet paper that people were stocking up on. It turns out that farmers and distributors had stocked up heavily on these chemicals. That probably explains why the stock was at an all-time high when I bought.
Anyway, that meant that the following years as I owned the stock, the sales more or less fell through the floor, and following that, so did the stock price. To date, that stock is my biggest loser. My value on that stock has dropped 79 percent.
Thanks dad!
I am holding tough on it though. In November, they shut down their operations in India, and that caused another huge drop in price. What I know about the company, they have great products, and they will come back, though I don’t know that they will hit that high. I am considering buying more stock to lower my cost basis to a more reachable number. It won’t take much, considering it’s down around 13 dollars now!
