“And Mr. Schmucko here bought 1000 shares if you can believe it “
I have a few similar stories. You are not alone :-).
I now invest in mutual funds ... I kind of buy and forget them :-). I mostly use those funds targeted to my retirement date.
I have ZERO patience when it comes to trading and I am far too paranoid. I have some Apple stock I got on the cheap that I refuse to sell since some I sold tripled in value not even a year after I sold it (I did buy a bunch of stuff for jobs I do on the side, so I can’t *really* complain, but I would rather have the over $100K I pissed away by being nervous).
I also invest in a couple of FPGA companies that I hold for the long term since that’s what I do for a living and know those companies well. That’s about it for individual stocks.
Some people are very talented and well disciplined when it comes to trading. I am not one of those people nor will I ever be that way. That’s why I focus on engineering ... When I start something new, I can spend a week or two changing, second guessing, rearranging, and coding stuff w/o losing anything then build on that :-). If you do that kind of stuff with stocks, you’ll either lose, or miss out on opportunities that’ll drive you crazy for a little while :-).
Apple is another one I invested in, Amazon as well which I of course sold early. Probably the best advice I ever got when it comes to investing in stocks like that is “invest only what you are willing to lose and never ever sell at a loss” Unless you have that kind of mentality, you will never ever ever hold on to it long enough to make any kind of real money. Every stock always goes higher than what you paid for it if you wait long enough unless it’s some penny crap. I just wish I was a little insane back then and held because God almighty, the kind of money I could have made would have been absolutely unreal but man oh man, when I had all my money in Google, I thought I was going to have a heart attack watching it because as you know, stocks can drop 10 points in the blink of an eye and for me that would have meant $10,000 bucks gone. Plus it was a freakin website, I was saying to myself “What the hell am I doing investing $100k into a website” Of course now it’s the richest corporation in the world *sigh* Facebook is one I wish I invested in. When that dropped into the 20s I absolutely knew it would rise again, now it’s trading at 117, massive profit.