May 17th, 2009
What’s in My Portfolio: American Capital Limited and Idearc
Not every stock I’ve bought (or have received any other way) has worked out the way I wanted. Such is the case with the two I’m looking at this time: American Capital Limited and Idearc. Both of these are currently in my Roth IRA, so there’s no tax implications with them at this point.
Idearc is a stock I received as a spin off from Verizon. It’s apparently a company that does white and yellow page directories and related advertising–clearly a stock I would never have bought on my own. It’s never been worth a whole lot (I believe it was in the twenties when I got it) but now it’s almost worthless at six cents a share–and I only have about two shares. At least I can take solace in the fact that I would not have purchased this loser on my own.
That’s not the case with American Capital Limited, however. ACAS is a private investment firm–say “private capital”–that paid a large dividend and was doing very nicely for quite a few years when I decided to dive in. While I cannot find the exact price I paid for the stock due to some issues with Firstrade’s Web site, I’ve lost well over 90% on the investment–to the point where the transaction fee to cut this stock loose would be a huge amount of the money I would get back.
As I said before, not every stock I’ve bought has worked out–here are two that really haven’t. I’m lucky in that the ones that have worked out have so far overshadowed those that haven’t. We’ll keep looking at parts of my portfolio as time goes by.
