Chapter 100: Planning Investments

Monday, March 19, 1984

Posters for the Student Council campaign were up all over school. There were some from ‘outsider’ candidates, and a couple of them might well have a shot, particularly for some of the class rep positions. A few others were clearly joke or protest candidates. Sometimes those won, though. If I hadn’t entered the race, Danny Hill might well have won, for instance.

The morning announcements covered the basketball championship, and said that Spirit merchandise would be available for order today and delivered soon. Thinking back on it, I’m pretty sure the football vote had authorized the Spirit committee to make merchandise for any state championships. Good for them, just taking charge and making it happen!

Beyond that, the day was pretty uneventful until late in lunch, when I was ambushed. Not that I particularly minded, in retrospect, but it was definitely an ambush.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to find Sam Myers. With her in Drama, I saw her every day, but we’d played things quiet aside from that.

“Hi, Sam,” I said, getting up. “What’s up?”

“I have a question for you. Couldn’t wait for Drama,” she said.

“Oh?”

She grinned a bit and said, in a bit of a rush, “Would you be my date for the Sadie Hawkins dance? That is, if no one else has asked? Before you ask, I’m not seeing anyone right now. I mean, not that it matters for Sadie Hawkins, but it might matter to you.”

No one else had asked, of course. I fully suspected Sam knew that; Jas would be in her corner, and so would Angie and Paige. Jess, too! By itself, that pretty much settled things — why in the world would I cross all four of them? — but add to it that I really liked Sam, and there was only one answer.

“I would be honored to be your date for the Sadie Hawkins dance,” I said.

“Yay!” she said, grinning. “I wanted to ask last week ... I mean, two weeks ago, before Spring Break — but it really wasn’t the best time.”

I nodded. “That makes sense.”

“I’ll pick everything out, of course. You just have to show up and look pretty,” she said, looking ever more like the Cheshire Cat, or perhaps the cat that got the canary.

“Yes, Ma’am!” I said.

She grinned, bounced up on her toes, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Then she turned and scooted away.

I turned around to find everyone trying to look nonchalant. Jas, Angie, and Paige were particularly absorbed in the contemplation of their mystery meat.

“Well?” I said.

“Sounds like fun!” Jas said, looking up and grinning.

“It does,” Cammie said, also grinning.

“She’s cute!” Mark said, followed quickly by an “Ow!”

Just as Mark complained, Morty said, “Really cute!”

Emily pretended to glare at Morty. “She is, but I get to say that first!”

“Yes, Ma’am!” Morty said. That was followed by another “Ow!” and that was followed by “But it worked for Steve!”

Everyone chuckled — including Mark and Morty, because it was obvious that Emily was just teasing. Whatever the three of them had, they still had it.

Sam and I got a fair bit of good-natured teasing in Drama. I had no idea who knew we’d been intimate (quite a while ago, now), but my best guess was that all of the girls knew and none of the guys knew. That’d be par for the course with this group (and, in my experience, for life in general).

I also didn’t know if anything was going to happen this time, nor — based on my own logic — could I know that. Sam could be planning something wild and crazy and change her mind, or she might be expecting nothing to happen and it might anyway. Who knew? It’d be a fun evening either way.

Jess gave me a subtle thumbs-up when Sam wasn’t looking. I figured we might talk about it later, but Jess knew Sam better than anyone else in Drama except for Lexi (but including me). I’d assumed she would be in favor. If she hadn’t been, I’d still have taken Sam to the dance (unless there was a serious problem, of course), but I’d have been on my guard.

I rushed us through the Student Council meeting today. Everyone was okay with that; we had no real business at all, with the elections going on and everything done. The only real updates were from the Spirit Committee (merchandise was selling at a very high pace again), Social Committee (tickets for Sadie Hawkins were selling well, too), and Prom Committee (pretty much everything was in place).

Barely an hour after we started, we were out the door. Thank goodness!

We headed straight home after Student Council, dropping Paige and Jasmine off on the way, with a promise to pick them up around seven-thirty. We ate dinner earlier than either the Seilers or Nguyens did, so we’d have some homework time after dinner, while they’d have some before dinner.

Mom and Dad were happy to have us home, as we’d hoped they would be, and we talked through dinner about school, college, the house, Professor Berman, and our plans in general. As of now, we expected to be at home for several weekends in a row, which was unprecedented in 1984. I expected we’d be at home nearly the entire time from late April to late May unless something unexpected happened.

After that, though, the definition of ‘home’ would shift considerably.

I gave Candice a quick call before we took off to meet Jasmine and Paige. She and Sherry were up for a triple-date on Friday, so we planned to meet at the pizza place at seven. It’d be good to catch up with them!

We picked up Jas and Paige on schedule and I headed for House of Pies. As I’d expected, Angie got us going right away.

“I want us to open a brokerage account right away,” she said. “Probably with Fidelity, since I’m used to them. Obviously, it’ll be MNM’s account, and I won’t be doing anything directly for a while, but still.”

Jas said, “Whatever you prefer is fine with me, really. I mean, I might have an opinion eventually, but I know you know this stuff better than I do.”

Paige said, “What she said!”

Angie looked at me in the rear-view mirror.

“If this was thirty years later, I might suggest Vanguard, but either is fine. Vanguard is harder to deal with right now, I think, though.”

“That’s where I am on it,” Angie said. “Easy is good! The main reason for today is that I want us to buy a few shares of Berkshire Hathaway soon. If I recall correctly, they won’t appreciate much for at least a decade, but not many shares trade at a time, and we’ll want to be heavily invested in them by the 1990s.”

“Not that I’m opposed,” Paige said, “But I’ve never heard of them, I don’t think.”

“You won’t for a while,” Angie said. “They’re run by the guy I mentioned before — Warren Buffet. Pretty much, he’s a genius at spotting value in other companies and buying stakes in them. Sometimes they buy the whole thing and operate it. We did a unit on Buffet in college. One thing that stood out for me is that their stock appreciated by a factor of forty over fifteen years. There’ll be other stocks that will do better, but they’re good. The other side effect is that, as stockholders, we’re entitled to visit the stockholder’s meeting, which — at least in 1997 or so — had a reputation as a place where people go to learn things about business and meet other businesspeople. Having a foot in the door in college will be big. Very few college students are going to be Berkshire shareholders in the 1980s.”

“I’ll second that,” I said. “I don’t know what the stock was valued at when I died, but I know it was over $100,000 a share a decade before that, and it just went up from there. Buffet was a still a big deal in 2021. He’s relatively under the radar in 1984.”

Jas said. “Definitely sounds like something we need to pursue.”

I said, “Honestly, Berkshire is one of the companies I’d put as much as I could into, at least today. If this world is like mine, they’ll consistently outperform the market. There are some specific opportunities later that will outdo them, though, and we’ll want to reshuffle as we get there.”

“Microsoft?” Angie said, grinning.

“Yeah,” I said. “As many IPO shares as we can possibly afford and are able to buy. Unfortunately, we won’t have the first wave of Dell money, which would hugely affect what we could invest, but we’ll be okay. It’ll go up and up and up. Some of the others go up faster at various points.”

“Basically, we need to be doing a few things,” Angie said. “Long-term investments, both to build capital and to position ourselves properly, are the basis, but we’ll need medium-term investments, like real estate and such, and short-term money management and maybe a bit of well-timed purchases of things, though that’s hard to do based on our vague memories — and harder to do if you don’t have those. That’s good for us, though — we’re merely trying to do what’s ‘hard,’ not what’s ‘very hard.’ There’s a reason why the people who are really good at this — like Warren Buffet — make a ton of money. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and it wouldn’t pay well.”

“Dell counts as both medium-term and long-term,” I said.

“Definitely, and that will probably be our biggest percentage appreciation ever,” Angie said. “Forty thousand for what we think will be five to seven million in four years. We’re not going to get a lot of factor-of-a-hundred appreciation in four years. Just not going to happen.”

“And the next ten?” I said.

“Probably that much again,” Angie said. “It was a monster by 1997.”

“There’ll be timing in there,” I said. “We don’t need to get into the weeds, but I think there’ll be times where we buy back in, and times when we drop a bit. If things go the way they originally did, staying in Michael’s good graces long-term will work out well, but it won’t be critical for us. Having this boost right now, though, may make the difference between our being millionaires and billionaires, long term.”

Jas said, “Part of why ‘we don’t need to get into the weeds’ is to keep Paige and I from knowing too much, right?”

Angie said, “That’s not what I’d say...”

Paige said, “No, I get it. And you’re right. If we’re going to be the voices of this universe, we need to know the plan in general, but the more we know that some company was supposed to take off like a rocket the less likely we’re going to be to say ‘Yeah, but what if it explodes on the launch pad and kills everyone on board?’”

“Good metaphor!” Jas said. “At least, unless there are some historic explosions like that.”

I shook my head. “There are two space-related tragedies that I would like to fix, but I might not have any leverage on the first, and the second is ... fuck if I know if I can do a damn thing about it.”

“And that gets back to our banning you from beating yourself up over things you didn’t cause and can’t fix,” Jas said.

“I know, I know,” I said, smiling.

I had a suspicion that, as much as we wanted to keep things to the here and now, Paige and Jasmine would have more and more questions about the future as we got going, particularly as Paige got deeper into business classwork. She was far behind Angie on theory, and behind me on years of accumulated knowledge, but she was holding her own. On the other hand, while Jasmine’s specialty was unlikely to be finance, she would know the basics and speak the language at the least.

We pulled up to House of Pies, which didn’t seem all that busy. Once we’d gotten seated, the waitress came and took our order. Our conversation mostly switched to less sensitive topics, though things like investments kept coming up.

On the drive back, Angie volunteered to call Fidelity and make us an appointment. Jas would have to take the lead in the appointment and with placing investment orders, but she welcomed Angie doing the initial legwork