Buying the world's most hated stock

Tossed some money this morning in a wastebasket labeled "Nokia" (NOK). A hundred shares @ $1.72. 

This is the sort of move The Experts tell you not to do, or your descendants will curse you down to the last generation. (But we have no kids, so we're safe.) The Experts keep a storehouse of words they dip into for situations like this. Value trap. Cheap for a reason. Spend a month researching it before you plunge.

Ghost Money says ish kabibble.

NOK has fallen hard, but it's not some poxy start-up in Baluchistan. It's a major international company. Nokia may never again be the King Kong of mobile phones, but it will find at least a niche where it will make money.

There are people who spend not just a month but all their days analyzing networks and smart phone operating systems and chips and 4G and no doubt soon 5G and 6G. Ghost Money can't imagine anything more boring. It would be losing our time. Whatever the state of play in smart phone technology at the moment, as revealed by the most painstaking study, it will be topsy-turvey in a few days.

Besides, if we can't afford to risk $172 we shouldn't be in the stock market at all. And there's no way the stock will go to zero -- in the worst scenario, another company will buy it for asset stripping.

Even with NOK in extremis, we haven't lost our eye for pricing. Yesterday the company blew out the doors -- reported a quarterly loss of only a dime a share, instead of the 11 cents or 12 cents the analysts expected. The predictable knees predictably jerked, and the stock was up 7-plus percent, if we recall, at one point. We didn't bite. We knew buyer's remorse would set in soon. As it turned out, today, when most of yesterday's gain washed out.

If it matters, NOK pays a dividend once a year. At least it has for two years running. Our guess is that if management wants to give Nokia the aura of a comeback, they will keep the dividend if they possibly can. The yield (assuming there continues to be any) is more than 12 percent.

Ghost Money says patience will be rewarded with NOK, but won't say how much patience, or how much reward.

Keywords: [NOK] [hated stocks] [smart phones]

Ghost Money's author does not claim to know what he's talking about. He is not an investment advisor. This site is for entertainment, if it can even manage that.