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 f...