Buying Stock?

A $10,000 investment is worth more than $4.5 million today

Take Wal-Mart for example. Not long after Sam Walton figured out how to bring powerful consumer access to suburban and rural America, some forward-thinking investors grabbed up shares. The really smart ones held on tight...
Now to billions of people around the world, Wal-Mart is the place you go to buy tootsie rolls, a ping pong table, motor oil, diapers, a microwave, ice skates -- you name it, all at great prices.
What has Wal-Mart's stock done since 1980 (a full decade after it went public) through all kinds of up and down markets... all kinds of inflation... deflation... rising dollar... falling dollar... and a couple of wars?

With shares trading around $51 today, Wal-Mart has risen 467 times in value over the past 28 years. That's 25% annual growth -- every year for over a quarter century!
Let's face it, getting in on a blockbuster investment like Wal-Mart in 1980 was a life-changing event for early investors.

The same can be said for getting into Nike in 1987, just as that stock went on a historic run, making over 5,000% for its early investors.
And Starbucks went from zero to full-blown global phenomenon practically in the blink of an eye - another bonanza for early investors!
Companies like these don't come along too often. And that's precisely the reason for this email.

The customer is king

Did you know that the average company loses more than half its customers every 5 years? Why?

It's simple. Most companies start to think they're more important than their customers. And they get greedy, too. That's when they try to stick it to their customers in ways they don't think their customers will notice. I'm talking about excessive fees on things like hotel phone bills... rental-car gas charges... credit card fees, to name a few.
Or they cut customer benefits, while raising prices. What happens? Customers start to feel ripped off and they look for alternatives. And once they're gone, they're near impossible to get back.

That's just dumb. Yet it happens all the time.
Some companies, however, have kept the "customer experience" front and center. Remember the Starbucks example? Or take Apple for instance, they pride themselves on dreaming up what customers want before they know it...

Always a better product, always a better customer experience. And what has Apple's stock done? Shares have soared -- up 1,543% in the last 5 years.