Sixty percent?!

[MorningGlow]

Okay, I know nothing about money and investments, mainly because I don't have any of either. I got a quarterly statement from our mutual funds the other day, and stuff has dropped. Ick. I will not be looking at those quarterly reports again for a good long time.

However, my aunt has quite a few shares of stock in a stable, prominent, popular insurance company. My uncle (her brother) left them to her when he died last July. She asked me to keep an eye on their price, because she wanted to cash them out and split them up the way he had designated (1/3 to his son, 1/3 to her, and 1/3 to my mom--the third sibling).

So I set up a little stockwatcher thing on iGoogle. Last fall the stocks had bopped up over $100 a share, but then dropped to something like $97 per share. My aunt the gambler said she wanted to wait till they went back into the triple digits before cashing out. I told her I'd keep watching.

Today that stock is at $40 per share.

I'm a numbers idiot, and I was flayed alive in elementary school by fractions and percentages, but I'm gonna hazard a guess that this means her stocks have dropped 60 percent.

This is incredible. I'm just agog. Had to share. Going back to trying to balance my checkbook now.