Stocks may hold attention of teen

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, April 6, 2007

Each spring, my daughter gets her copy of the Otter Tail Corporation’s annual report. She is a stockholder via a birthday gift from her grandfather several years ago, and so each March receives, along with the annual report, a proxy form and an invitation to the annual meeting.

Her holdings — if one can use so grand a word — have increased nicely over the years. But my daughter does not seem to care much about the financial returns.

For her, the biggest benefit of stock ownership has always been the hope that we will let her skip school to attend the annual meeting.

Most years, we insist that she spend the day at school. On occasion we relent, and this is one of those years. We hope that what she will learn about business will outweigh the chemistry or English classes that she misses next Monday.

Otter Tail’s annual meeting is one of those milestone events that mark the turn of the seasons in Fergus Falls, and it always draws a big crowd. I am not sure what percentage of Fergus Falls families own Otter Tail stock, but it has to be a big number.

The community-gathering aspects of the meeting earned Otter Tail a chapter in a recent book, “A Weekend With Warren Buffett and Other Shareholder Meeting Adventures.”

Author Randy Cepuch traveled the country attending annual meetings, ranging from Wal-Mart’s gigantic gathering — 15,000 stockholders — to the legendary Berkshire Hathaway meetings where investment guru Warren Buffett makes news with his opinions. Along the way, he stopped in at Otter Tail’s 2002 meeting.

Often enough, when we read about Fergus Falls and other small-town, center-of-the-nation places, the writer is at pains to make us the butt of small-town humor.

Cepuch treats Fergus Falls and Otter Tail Corporation rather fairly, painting an appealing picture of our community and the annual meeting — despite reporting that a waiter spilled a glass of water down his pants.

Which is not to say that any of it sounds quite right. Any outsider’s description is something like taking a good, hard look at yourself in the mirror for the first time in awhile. There’s no doubt that it’s you, but neither is it quite how you imagined you looked.

At any rate, it’s fun to see our community get some press. The book is available at Lundeen’s, if you’d like to read it.

One of Otter Tail’s claims to fame is that it unerringly produces a quarterly dividend for its shareholders. My daughter has chosen to re-invest her dividend in additional Otter Tail stock purchases every quarter, and it is amazing how the value has piled up.

The actual dollar amounts are rather small, because she began with a very small stake. But size aside, in the years since her grandfather gave her the stock, the total value of her stake has nearly doubled.

Indeed, it’s an object lesson in why size doesn’t matter so much when it comes to investing — at least not if you start early enough.

If the few hundred dollars of my daughter’s initial investment continues to grow at the same rate as it has the past few years, it will eventually be worth some serious money. Not soon, by any means. But if the stock continues to perform and she lives a normal lifespan, the girl will end up with half a million dollars from that tiny initial investment.

That’s interesting enough that a kid might even want to pay attention at the annual meeting.

Journal publisher Dave Churchill’s column runs on Fridays.