In 1987 I sold 30,000 shares of Phillips Petroleum for $17 and invested that money in a meat packing company stock that an account manager assured me would go straight up.
I was in Dallas on business when my secretary finally caught up with me to say that my account manage had called several times and was desperate to talk with me.
I called him and he told me the market had crashed and if I sold right then he might be able to recoup as much as $30,000 of my original investment.
The company I had invested in declared bankruptcy that next week and the stock I sold was worth only pennies on the dollar.
Never again will I trust these Hardvark University know it alls to invest one penny of my money.
Investing in the stock market I have come to conclude is an idiotic gamble unless your a huge player with inside information.
Sort of like the Washington Insiders or the Wall Street gang.
I don't do cocktail parties out here in the California desert so am at a disadvantage with the in crowd.
I figures out some time back that as a small investor, without the time to devote to watching the market, I just wasn’t going to do any better than the meager returns of a no-load index fund. Until Dec 2006, I had most of my 401(k) in an S&P 500 index fund that did very nicely right until 2000 anyway. In December 2006, I saw the housing collapse coming and got the hell out of the market and straight into cash and have been urging everybody here to do so also. At least the masses of “buy and hold” types that don’t have the time and knowledge to be traders — which is most of us.