I got into Walgreen Boots because I had worked with folks at their corporate offices and thought they were a strong company. When I bought them, they had a problem and they ended up cutting their dividend in half. That spooked a lot of investors, and should have spooked me, but I didn’t know any better.
This is what happens when you hold onto a belief that the company will bounce back when they suffer through some problems. Sometimes they do, but in this case, it didn’t work out so well.
Walgreen Boots ended up selling to another company and that company is not public so they don’t have shares of stock. They just ended up buying the stock from all the investors who clung on(like me) to the very end.
To be honest, I really just wanted to see what would happen. Turns out that my broker just put the money into my available cash and then removed the stock from my list. I kind of suspected that was what would happen but I wanted to see it, so I waited till it was done automatically rather than selling out early.
I lost a fair amount of money on that whole investment. You’d think that would have convinced me that buying by my heart instead of my mind is not a great thing to do, but I still continue to buy stocks for companies that I use and like. Go figure.
