GE lower than a snake's belly in a tire rut.

[SpartacusSchmartacus]

Have not checked but they might be the last original DOW stock? Seems like a break up is required. Bad management and bad luck never go together.
Anyone holding this still ... the chart has been going down for years?

 

[corn18]

I had some a couple of years ago but then turned boglehead and sold it. It's not at the bottom yet! And those dividends are awesome, right?

 

[Breedlove]

I worked for a company that had been invaded by GE managers , and later bought out by GE . In my life I had not experienced a bigger group or arrogant know it all bunch of people . Took our company from 5.1 B to just over 1 billion . Now all of these east coast giants have left the company with golden parachutes and the present people are trying to rebuild from the ashes . GE and their managers are not , I have said enough.

 

[Luvdogs]

I bought at $15.88 in 2011. Rode it up to $25, then sold at about $22 last year. Whew!!

Unrelated story--Back in 1988, we had a GE refrigerator. They had ads on TV that if your appliance broke, that they would be available for service any day even Christmas and New Years.

Well our fridge went out on New Years, called them and of course couldn't get hold of anyone. It was only about 1-2 years old.

So I hand wrote a letter to the CEO "some guy named Jack Welch" lol and listed all the stuff in my fridge that went bad--did not pad it or anything, cheap burger, cheap chicken, ketchup (don't think it goes bad) but anyway the total was $75 and I requested reimbursement for it.

I was promptly sent a check for $75.

When we moved shortly thereafter, we bought the same refrigerator (but next generation--they figured out the problem) and it is almost 30 years old and still running in our garage.

 

[Popeye]

Many of these types of bureaucratic companies seem unable to grow except through acquisitions. They just don’t know how to do it. Their managers just hop from position to position every 3-5 years and never really learn how to do anything. My megacorp was in a big GE industry and was acquired by a GE competitor. The factory site is closing after 100+ years in operation at this location.

 

[audreyh1]

I worked for a company that had been invaded by GE managers , and later bought out by GE . In my life I had not experienced a bigger group or arrogant know it all bunch of people . Took our company from 5.1 B to just over 1 billion . Now all of these east coast giants have left the company with golden parachutes and the present people are trying to rebuild from the ashes . GE and their managers are not , I have said enough.

So that was the trick - leave (or get pushed out of) GE. "Invade" another company, then get it bought out by GE.

Wow - nice gig if you can get it. I think the GE managers must have been masters at raiding a company and grabbing their personal gold parachutes.

$5B to $1B. Outrageous!

 

[brett]

I had the same experience as an employee and as an investor in Hp. Sold my stock and dumped my options at $43-$52 thanks to some very prudent advice from our fee for service FA. It enabled me to FIRE early. At the time, the wags were all calling for a $75 stock. Those pigs that held on to stock, options and RSU's got slaughtered. We in the company realized that this target price was not in the cards.

Last time I looked, prior to the breakup, the stock was down in the low 20's. Same story....bad management since Carly came on board all the way down to Hurd. Many good people bailed. It got so bad that as a director we had trouble promoting to first level managers from within the company-individual contributors did not want the job nor did the 'trust' the company.

 

[audreyh1]

I had the same experience as an employee and as an investor in Hp. Sold my stock and dumped my options at $43-$52 thanks to some very prudent advice from our fee for service FA. It enabled me to FIRE early. At the time, the wags were all calling for a $75 stock. Those pigs that held on to stock, options and RSU's got slaughtered. We in the company realized that this target price was not in the cards.

Last time I looked, prior to the breakup, the stock was down in the low 20's. Same story....bad management since Carly came on board all the way down to Hurd. Many good people bailed. It got so bad that as a director we had trouble promoting to first level managers from within the company-individual contributors did not want the job nor did the 'trust' the company.

Wow!

And so many of us engineers remembered HP as the instrumentation company.

And were blown away when that original part spun off into Agilent.

 

[JoeWras]

HP makes me cry.

GE makes me angry.

 

[ERD50]

Wow!

And so many of us engineers remembered HP as the instrumentation company.

And were blown away when that original part spun off into Agilent.

HP makes me cry.

GE makes me angry.

Agreed. Our MegaCorp worked pretty closely with HP, and it just seemed wrong that the Test & Measurement division was the part that took the new name, "Agilent". Test equipment/instrumentation is what put HP on the map. I wonder what Bill and Dave would have thought (wiki says Agilent spun off 1999, and Bill Hewlett was still alive- died 2001, Dave Packard was gone in 1996 )?

-ERD50

 

[ransil]

Keysight is the instrument spinoff from Agilent. First instruments after the name change were a sticker job over the old logos.

HP also had a medical division, I kinda work there now.

 

[pb4uski]

....Those pigs that held on to stock, options and RSU's got slaughtered. ...

I think you mean hogs.... the saying is "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered".

What does 'Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered' mean?
This idiom is used to express being satisfied with enough, that being greedy or too ambitious will be your ruin.

 

[NW-Bound]

It is sad to see corporations with a long and proud history like GE and HP got destroyed by CEOs who possessed little of the core technical competency that was the tradition of the respective corporations.

I still have several pieces of HP instruments in my home electronic hobby shop. HP for spectrum analyzers and signal generators. Tektronix for o'scopes. One learned from the master analog circuit designers by studying the schematic diagrams of these things.

 

[aja8888]

It is sad to see corporations with a long and proud history like GE and HP got destroyed by CEOs who possessed little of the core technical competency that was the tradition of the respective corporations.

I still have several pieces of HP instruments in my home electronic hobby shop. HP for spectrum analyzers and signal generators. Tektronix for o'scopes. One learned from the master analog circuit designers by studying the schematic diagrams of these things.

Their older model business printers were indestructible. I am still running a HP 4040 unit at home (over 10 years now).

 

[GrayHare]

I console myself about GE by remembering last year some poor soul paid $9714.38 per share of HMNY. Today those shares traded at 3 cents each.

 

[ERD50]

It is sad to see corporations with a long and proud history like GE and HP got destroyed by CEOs who possessed little of the core technical competency that was the tradition of the respective corporations.

I still have several pieces of HP instruments in my home electronic hobby shop. HP for spectrum analyzers and signal generators. Tektronix for o'scopes. ...

I think you'll like this...

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/beauty-of-old-electrical-and-measuring-things-etc.755959/

... One learned from the master analog circuit designers by studying the schematic diagrams of these things.

One late evening, I "caught" our VP of Technology "dumpster diving" for the manuals of the HP equipment we had purchased. I bought large quantities for production, and we only needed a few manuals for reference, so the rest went in the trash (these are big binders, they take up lots of space). Yes, he wanted to study the schematics.

I told him, next time we'll save some for you!

-ERD50

 

[NW-Bound]

The stuff in that forum thread is quite a bit older than what I still have, which are of 1970-2000 vintage.

 

[Christine]

It is sad to see corporations with a long and proud history like GE and HP got destroyed by CEOs who possessed little of the core technical competency that was the tradition of the respective corporations.

Sad and expensive. I bought an expensive laptop a few years ago. Mainly because it was a HP model. My next one will not be from HP.

 

[Breedlove]

In the case of our company the GE managers were all products of Jack Welch management school . Now even Seeking Alpha is writing about the worthless people that took over these companies .

I remember one of our VP's having a meeting with us , after we had been a leading service provider in our field that we were no longer going to be a service company ,he said we are Lions ..We are going to walk with other Lions , not lead .



Guess what we lost so many customers my company is now under control of another company and investment group .
No love for these people , they have harmed so many companies they buy out and the people within them .


I just don't understand these managers / get rid of 10% of your workforce every year and rehire . We had people who had ran a pet shop telling rig hands how to run jobs .

 

[JoeWras]

In the case of our company the GE managers were all products of Jack Welch management school .

My megacorp has a few in the c-suite now. Since this happened a few years ago, mega has changed. The stock has gone up, the morale as dropped.

It will be interesting to see how sustainable it is. The business is all about business and not about the technology, in a tech companty. I fear an HP reckoning coming. The good news is I'll be long gone.

 

[retired1]

Have not checked but they might be the last original DOW stock? Seems like a break up is required. Bad management and bad luck never go together.
Anyone holding this still ... the chart has been going down for years?

GE happens to be only 5 individual stocks I have. I bought~275 shares @ 18/share, and sold only 75 (at a loss of course) after reading all the bad news about GE. I plan to keep 200 shares on mainly for Dividend payouts. Not sure why but I resist selling anything even if it's a roller coaster. That's why I hate buying individual stocks (don't have time to keep up) and I'm 90% in balanced Mutual Funds or ETFs for diversification.

 

[Clone]

We had a new CEO many years back that was a Jack Welch fan boy. He did a lot of things that made a lot of money for the company, but he also did a lot of stupid things.


They brought in a new VP of Customer Experience (some title like that) that new absolutely nothing about our product, the market, or our customers. He had been somebody important in a credit card company, and you know, they deal with a lot of customers.


We had some local facility managers who were real lapdogs for corporate. They started tearing down buildings to get them off the assets list. All in the name of improving the Return on Assets ratio. Some of these buildings were less than 10 years old.



5 years after the CEO left, we were putting up buildings again because we were out of space. In one case, they built a new building that was almost identical to the 10 year old building that had been torn down. And they built it in the same place. I think it was intended to be a monument to wasteful policies.

 

[JoeWras]

Although my Mega hasn't started tearing down and rebuilding, they are firing and rehiring!

 

[JackJester]

Urgh! I bought GE at $31.05 in 2016. I thought I'd experiment with building my own dividend portfolio of 5 individual stocks. I realized that was a big mistake and now I just buy SCHD. I still have the GE stock. I'll sell as soon as it recovers ...if it ever does.

 

[SpartacusSchmartacus]

GE happens to be only 5 individual stocks I have. I bought~275 shares @ 18/share, and sold only 75 (at a loss of course) after reading all the bad news about GE. I plan to keep 200 shares on mainly for Dividend payouts. Not sure why but I resist selling anything even if it's a roller coaster. That's why I hate buying individual stocks (don't have time to keep up) and I'm 90% in balanced Mutual Funds or ETFs for diversification.

There is talk of GE not continuing with Dividends just to stay alive ... many are suggesting this. Maybe best to set a stop loss with your on-line acct at a certain price in case this happens? Just sayin cuz if it does get announced who knows where the stock would drop to ... might protect the bit remaining?