So, I Sold My Aston Martin

A real Aston Martin

Some time ago, way back in 2020, I bought some shares of Aston Martin stock. I'm not a millionaire, and I can't afford to buy an Aston Martin car like James Bond, but on the other hand, I have a feeling he gets his for free! Anyway, I was looking at Aston Martin stock and saw that at the time the price was something like 75 cents per share. Shoot, even I can afford 75 cents for a share of a cool car company. So long story short, I bought some shares at 75 or so cents, figuring that the worst thing that would happen is that my money would be worth less, but at least I could always say "I used to own an Aston Martin."

Over the decades, from what I can read, the Aston Martin company has had more bad times than good as far as making money goes, so in the long run it's probably no the greatest investment in the world. However, in the past year, there have been some big names investing in the company trying to turn it around. F1 racer Lance Stroll's dad Lawrence Stroll being a big investor, and so much so that he's going to also bring Aston Martin back into Formula 1 this year, having bought out the Racing Point team, also formerly known as Force India. 

Then the Mercedes folks wanted to own a part of Aston Martin, or more than they used to, so they've invested a bunch of dollars and pounds and Euros into Aston Martin. With all this interest in the brand, plus the return to F1, I was thinking just maybe the stock price will go up! I also buy 70 million to 1 lottery tickets, so you can already tell I'm not the most gifted math person on the planet. 

As I was happily following along "my" company's stock price, it would go down, then up, mostly down, but kept hovering around the price I'd paid for it, so it was fun to keep track of along the way. Then one day I looked at the price of the stock, and it wasn't in pennies, it was in dollars, like 15 dollars per share. This made no sense to me, but of course if anyone ever wanted to give me 20 times what it had been worth before, that would be OK with me! 

It turned out to be a "reverse stock split," where they took every 20 shares you used to have, and gave you 1 in return, at the same value. This meant that I didn't make any money, and didn't lose any money. I guess companies will do this to make the company stock price more appealing, since who would invest in a 10 cent or 75 cent stock? That kind of price makes it sound like the company isn't doing very well. But, a 15 dollar stock...well, maybe that sounds more like a real company that's selling stuff and making money. Who knows? 

Anyway, somehow this must have worked, or maybe Mr. Stroll's involvement worked, or maybe the Mercedes involvement worked, or maybe even having a Formula 1 team again worked, because the stock price soon doubled to about 30 bucks a share! Of course my 75 cents didn't go up to 30 dollars, but it did go up to a whopping $1.50 once you do the math. 

So, after a few months of ownership, and no miles per gallon, I sold my Aston Martin. Maybe there is a Chinese car company I can buy next.