Jalopnik: gm stock

Buying GM Stock Is NOT Like Gambling At A Casino

Ray Wert — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:00:00 EDT

One important distinction between GM stock and casino gambling is at a casino, if the player loses, the dealer still wins. Nobody wins with GM stock.

Texas Dealers: Buy A GM Vehicle, Get 50 Shares Of GM Stock!

Ray Wert — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:30:00 EDT

Two Texas dealers are trying to flip General Motors' low stock price into profits by offering customers 50 shares of GM common stock to buy a new GM vehicle by the end of the month. Will and Corrie Churchill, owners of Frank Kent Motor Co. in Fort Worth, Texas, began their promotion this week and will offer it to the first 100 customers "because this is GM's 100-year anniversary," Will Churchill said. We can't make this up. Seriously, if they'd come to me with this as a joke in a post I would have cut it for being too easy, formulaic and punny. Guess it serves me right. Shown up by reality. I hate it when that happens. Wait, it's happening again — guess what the name of the promotion is. Hit the jump to find out.

We should have seen that coming. But anyway, how will the Churchill brothers "gold standard" plan work?

Here's what AN tells us:

"The Churchills bought 5,000 shares of GM stock at the end of last week to begin the promotion while GM's stock price was low. The gift was worth $321 today at GM's closing stock price of $6.43, and the Churchills hope to give customers a return on their investment.
"Typically when a customer buys a car and they go to trade it in in two or three years, it has depreciated," Will Churchill said. "Hopefully in two or three years," GM stock "will probably be worth more."

We'd heard American retro kitsch was the "in thing" these days, but this is ridiculous. On an unrelated note to Will: If you're saying "Hopefully," in a statement, I wouldn't think you'd need to use "probably." Oh, wait, I see what he's done there. [via Automotive News (sub. req.), Photo Credit: Freakingnews.com]

GM Share Prices Go Retro In Search Of Better Times, Wagoner Hits YouTube To Shore Up Confidence

Andrew Stoy — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:40:00 EDT

Ford's trading at a price lower than a gallon of gas today, but how's their publicly-traded Detroit-based buddy doing on Wall Street this week? The Detroit News reports in the past five days of stock trading, General Motors has lost more than a quarter of its value, closing at $6.91 Wednesday (and dropping below $5 a share today). That's the lowest the automaker's stock has been since 1953 — meaning GM's share price hit a 55-year low. We'd all like to think that this is nothing more than GM trying to again cash in on the whole "retro" trend, first with the resurgence of the muscle car wars and now with 50s-era stock prices. However, we know that's just a good punchline. Back to the future — GM is in a more precarious cash flow position than Ford, who is facing a similar market stock price crash, since Ford hocked pretty much everything two years ago in exchange for $23 billion in loans. So what do you do if you're GM? Put the boss on YouTube, of course.

We're told the share price declines haven't affected the way the two companies conduct their daily business, but as University of Michigan business professor Gerald Meyers noted, "It's like finding out that you have a terminal disease. You try to do something about it, but you know and everyone around you knows that you are in deep trouble." He would know: Meyers was a former Chairman and CEO at American Motors. [Detroit News]

Two Gallons of Gas Equals One Share Of GM Stock

Andrew Stoy — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:00:00 EDT

GM shares dropped to their lowest point in 40 years yesterday, closing at $11.43 when the bell rang. To put things in perspective, if you bought a new-for-1968 Camaro instead of, say, 245 shares of GM stock (about the same price at the time), the car would have been a significantly better investment. Yeah, we're excluding splits, dividends and the like, but they're not convenient for the point we're making. In a statement containing several unnecessarily large words, Goldman analyst Patrick Archambault said he "expects GM shares to continue to underperform as market fundamentals deteriorate which exacerbates liquidity concerns." Translation: GM's cars aren't selling so it's gonna spend all its cash.

Of course, GM looks like Apple next to Ford shares, which are sitting at a measly $5.07. However, Ford is rated as a "neutral" while GM stock was downgraded to "sell." Why? Because that's where the dart landed, we'd assume. Isn't that how all this stock stuff works?
[Automotive News (sub. req.); Photo Credit: Freakingnews.com]