Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Well, hello and welcome to the Dividend Cafe.

I am your host, David Bonson, where today we're going to do a little history lesson that provides some

fun information for the future. All investing is essentially a byproduct of learning from the past

to apply in the present to have a better future. I would argue most study of history in any discipline

for any purpose and aim is basically the same. Learning from the past, I've always loved that

quote from John Kennedy about a knowledge of the past preparing us for the crisis of the present and the challenge of the

future. There is tremendous opportunity for investors in the future, but investors who attempt

to pursue that future without learning from the past make a grave mistake. And there is no more

stark example of this, no clear, shall we say, lesson in history

than in the failed merger of AOL and Time Warner that took place 25 years ago. The reason I'm

devoting this week's Dividending Cafe to this particular event is a

byproduct of the moment in history hitting a 25 year anniversary of the most spectacular

business failure in history, the most dollars ever set on fire in history.

And that is all the more true in inflation adjusted dollars, but it's actually true in then nominal dollars as well.

And there are so many incredible, clear, bright lines of lessons and principles at play here that I couldn't

resist devoting this Dividing Cafe to the failure of the AOL time order merger that took

place in the year 2000.

I happened to have read not one and not two, but three books on the subject here just since

summer began. And I had had some inspiration. I've been rather intimately familiar with this

story for a long time. I was a 1990s investor in various internet bubble investments. The lessons learned out of that period

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