What do you think is the strangest stock?


A few possibilities:

Pinelawn Cemetery (PLWN): the company owns a 500-acre cemetery on Long Island, which has its own commuter rail stop. It still has a lot of unsold plots, the plot sales price is tied to inflation, and it pays a 9.1% dividend.

I would probably buy a couple of shares of it if I could, but it's inaccessible to most investors. There was a ProPublica piece on the company last month:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cemetery-long-island-pinelawn-lockes-pinelawn

Giant Group (GGLT): a Beverly Hills-based nanocap that's led by Burt Sugarman, the Warren Buffett of '70s variety shows. He's been the CEO for 30 or 40 years.

Its only activity seems to be its 8% ownership of Checkers and Rally's stock. It might also own a cement company, but it's hard to tell, because it hasn't filed a 10-K since 2004.

Buck Hill Falls (BUHF): Buying this stock is sort of like buying an HOA membership without actually living there. The company owns a planned community in rural Pennsylvania, and spends all of its profits on maintaining the golf course, etc. It's possibly never paid a dividend in the entire time it's been in existence, which is over a century.

The best-case scenario for a shareholder (or at least a non-resident shareholder) would be the sale of the community to another company. But that might not happen in the next hundred years.


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