Friday, June 26, 1998

Never Too Early to Begin
By Meera Ramchandran ([email protected])

My 3 1/2-year-old son is proof that it is never too early to start teaching children about investing. He started watching the PBS program Nightly Business Report with us on a daily basis last summer. He loved the signature good bye of Paul Kangas! Pretty soon he was updating visitors with information on the movements of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and people wanted to know if we were trying to raise the next generation's Warren Buffett!

But in typical preschooler fashion, he hated being corrected by us when he misinterpreted the plus and minus signs, so we were forced to teach him that a plus sign or an upward arrow meant the stock was up, while the minus sign or a downward arrow meant that the stock was down. My husband and I own a considerable position in Intel and Cisco. (Need I even mention which company got my vote for the next Cash-King stock?) Naturally we would discuss the stocks quite often, so whenever any friend with some cash in hand wondered where to put his money, our son would immediately say "Buy Intel or Cisco. My mom says Cisco will make people rich."

We were Foolish in some ways and Wise in others, but generally more Foolish than Wise, so when I started reading the Fool web site, it didn't take me more than a week to recognize that we shared a lot in common with the Fools. When we put some money into Caterpillar, a Dow dog, as part of the Foolish Four strategy, no one was happier than my son, who loves playing with the CAT toy trucks. Now he knows we have a soup stock (Campbell), a grocery store stock (Safeway), a car stock (GM), two gasoline stocks (Exxon and Chevron) as part of our portfolio and gets regular updates on these stocks from us. He has also started giving us stock ideas; after a recent Disneyland trip, he wanted to know if we owned Disney stock and also suggested that we buy Southwest Airlines, because the flight attendants were nice to him!

So go ahead, Foolish parents, and give your toddler a head start on investing! Who knows? Our kids may become Fools when they are teenagers instead of in their twenties!

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