Maybe if you bought and held it, but there were plenty of opportunities to make a quick buck in recent years. Before the split the stock was down to like $5-$6 in 2018 and doubled in the price in part to the work that Culp has one.

Didn't GE spin out or sell a lot of their business after that time? So you would have to look at the stock price for all of those spun out businesses too.

(EDIT: and also any dividend they may have paid out over that time period.)

>If you bought their stock any time after 1997 you've lost money on that trade

Regardless of what you see on that chart, this is not correct at all.

I bought in October 2020 when the price began to bounce up or trend up from a long-term low. I am up on that investment more than 25% as of this morning. I also bought Ford just as their stock began to bounce off of the lows in early 2020 and am doing well on it too.

Your performance on any stock purchase is strongly tied to the date you purchased it and the health of the company at the time. I watched these stocks of old-school conglomerates decline as people moved money to new tech offerings. These companies are not going anywhere so I bought when the price movement confirmed a new up trend and have held since.

I did the same thing years ago with Corning in late May of 2002, when at the time, they were the only company on earth that produced the glass for LCD display monitors and they produced most of the fiber-optic cable and the pc industry was beginning to recover while entities everywhere were planning to upgrade fiber-optics after the huge dot-com bust. I paid just over $1/share as it built the right side of the cup pattern on a big bounce. Corning survived of course and went on to continue to dominate glass-making with Gorilla glass being nearly ubiquitous in consumer products not to mention their huge fiber-optics production.

GE used to be into everything. They have shed a lot of under-performing or non-aligned assets but they still have a huge role in diesel-electric locomotives, jet engines, etc.

They will spin off a few things but that only allows them to improve focus.

At least GE has real products to spin off.

Many of these new tech VC-backed XaaS operations (some of which I have occasionally invested in) have nothing more than slippery marketing ploys pitched to gullible, cash-rich investors who have money to burn.

All I know is, a bunch of former GE people came over to a former company and basically tanked our engineering department. The engineers that migrated were successful overall (not 100% good hires, but definitely more than 50%), but all of the management that switched were terrible. It doesnt help that one of those managers also took over the Director of Engineering position, so had an outsized impact.