Peon, tea, and 50 Shares...

The first stock I ever bought was in 1996 and it was 50 shares of the company that I was working at, at that time. There's an interesting backstory of why I bought them. I was a project engineer in a manufacturing company and we had departmental peons. As a young and liberal person, I treated them with the same respect as I did my colleagues and managers. One of the peons confided in me that he needed a sum of money for some family events. To be honest, it was modest from my perspective but rather large from his. I didn't want to just lend him the money and I couldn't afford to give it to him as a charity; after all, I was also just starting my career and not in a very strong financial position. So, he told me that he still had 50 shares of the company that were issued to him before the IPO. I knew for a fact that the company was solid and the prospects were bright, from a long-term perspective. So, I bought 50 shares from him, got the paper certificate, and have still held on to them. Both, from a value investor perspective and from a nostalgia perspective. The company has regularly paid dividends of ~50% and the stock price has gone up 2.5x. Not a bad deal, eh?