Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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That in itself is pretty challenging: take a look at the Dow components in 1920:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_components_of_the_D...

Of those, zero are in the index today. The only ones I've even heard of are AT&T, GE, Studebaker, US Steel, Western Union, and Westinghouse, and half of those don't exist today.

(As a side note, it makes me wonder if the common wisdom of buying a stock market index and holding it is really just survivorship bias. If you bought the Dow in 1920 and held the individual companies, you'd be nearly bankrupt today; it's only because the index continually switches out declining companies for new large-caps that it's gone up continuously over long periods of time. That in itself might be a lesson that supports your point: the way to build a system that lives forever is to build a Ship of Theseus that can swap out and discard components that no longer serve its purposes without losing its overall identity.)

I'm not sure that your side note is a good example.

If you owned shares in the American Can Company, you would have then owned shares in Primerica and would now own shares in Citigroup which was only bumped out of the DJIA in 2009.

Several of the mining companies were bought out.

The Texas Company is Texaco.

United States Rubber Company became Uniroyal and was bought out by Michelin and Continental.

Sure, some like Studebaker and some of the locomotive companies collapsed and would have been a total loss, but it's entirely likely that holding all of those original companies would have made you a whole lot of money.

You also have to worry about bankruptcies, where even if the company is not liquidated, the shareholders are usually wiped out and the company recapitalized among debtholders. Texaco went bankrupt in 1987, for example - while it's part of Chevron now, the people who actually owned the stocks that were purchased were largely the bankruptcy creditors. Western Union went bankrupt in 1987 and 1991, Citigroup nearly went bankrupt in 2009 and was recapitalized with the U.S. government becoming a major shareholder (and diluting the existing shareholders).

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