Speaking of investing in a single company, I invested in a company that made the guts of smart phones. My daughter was working at the company and I personally knew the CEO. I knew its growth figures and cash flow and it seemed to offer a great ROI. After I had bought the stock, its price went up and up. What we didn't know is that it was being accumulated by a hedge fund which dumped all of its shares one night when the market was closed. I had a stop-loss on the position so I didn't lose too much but many people lost over 60%. I can provide the name and symbol of the company if you want to look at its chart and read the history. I tell you this to illustrate how anything can happen. Think of BP and its oil well blowout.

BTW, Dirty Dan, I fortunately took a lot of my profits on the Friday before Black Monday when the DOW fell 1,000 points. I also sold all of my oil and energy which constituted 18% of my portfolio and took 80% losses on the holdings. Painful. I suppose that oil prices will come back eventually but I live on dividends and interest and they simply won't be paying much for a while. I kept some of the pipeline companies because their prices have been irrationally hit by the fear contagion about oil and gas. I suspect that there may be some sovereign wealth fund and hedge fund manipulation of oil prices. These powerful forces can squeeze oil prices until all small investors sell. I hope that your oil and energy holdings will be OK. I don't think that they have any more room to fall and they will certainly recover to a certain extent sometime. Twenty years is probably a good timeline on your oil and energy holdings. Do you think that your money is better invested there than in a different sector? There are good preferred stocks and investment-grade bonds that would earn you at least a 60% return over 20 years at 3+% per year.

Google can not be trusted just because they hit the market so well the last few years. I predict that google will just be a name within 10 years, and nothing special.

bar stool talk at its best. Google is one of the largest companies in the world with huge stockpiles of cash. Is there a search engine that competes with google ....no. What about in 10 yrs? Who knows but one can possibly guarantee that they will still be the market leader.