Last weekend, my fiancée and I were catching up on old Shark Tank episodes. We love to watch entrepreneurs pitch their start-up ideas to “Sharks” like Mark Cuban and Barbara Corcoran.
Every year, the journal Popular Science releases a special list… It’s a list of the 100 greatest innovations of the year—from bionic arms and pain-free dentistry, to life-saving remedies that could change our world.
Last Thursday, a tech start-up called Square (NYSE: SQ) went public. For investors who got in early, when the company was still young and private, champagne corks should have been flying— After all, Square’s IPO gave the company a value of nearly $3 billion.
For more than a quarter of a century, General Mills (NYSE: GIS) has been a winning trade: If you’d invested $10,000 into the company in 1990 and reinvested the dividends, today you’d be sitting on $217,146. That’s roughly twice what the overall market returned.