This is it. At one point I would get nervous and take a 2 or 300% gain and miss out on the long play that stocks like Apple did. Had one back in the 90s that made me a quick ten grand in two weeks so I bailed. Three weeks later it would have been a $130,000 profit. That one still haunts me on occasion.
Glad to read this; same here. Not interested in losing with my luck. Still, with some good investments and luck I've managed to acquire several million dollars in spite of some drastic drops in the market and in stocks I purchased. I've had most success with stocks that were innovative - Shockwave (SWAV); IRythm (IRTC) - or were making a change - Celsius (CELH) - or were placed well Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in a growing area. Examples from more recent plays...
They aren’t terribly complicated. The best way to use them is as a hedge. Basically, if you own 100 shares or more of something, you sell a call option that is slightly OTM, or ATM with a strike that is somewhat above your entry price for the stock. That way, if it rockets you earn some gain on the sale of stock plus the premium. If it doesn’t go ITM, you keep the stock and premium and if if tanks, you still keep the premium and lose less on paper.
>The best way to use them is as a hedge.
Absolutely not, *and* the example you gave is like the worst hedge ever on top of that? A short call on a long underlying is hardly any hedge at all, and caps gains on a capital-intensive position for pennies on the dollar. At first you said hedge and I was thinking a long put, y'know, a tail risk hedge, an actual hedge? But a short call (not even on a pmcc but a full fledged 100 shares position)? Huh? Did you trade in 2022? Did you try this little trick then? Because one short call into a bloody week and you're *deep* outside your cost basis with no way to claw back to the green, especially if you're capping your upside with short calls. The wheel is an outmoded and weak overall options strategy, full stop.
I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. The *best* use of options? It's to buy stocks at half price. A deep itm latest-date-possible LEAPS provides you a .95+ delta exposure position at half (or less!) the price of buying the actual equity. And guess what? If your choice of equity downturns over 50% and makes your option expire worthless? Think of it as a free stop out on your typical 100 shares position, keeping you from losing what more you would lose with a 'non-synthetic' long position. Usually I charge but that tip is free, just for you pal. Lever yourself. Brush ya hair. Good luck.
This is my friend's TSLA few years before position, he bought it around 45 range, still holding it
[https://imgur.com/fALZG5w](https://imgur.com/qsrHb9c)
Another friend's AAPL position, not sold even single one yet
[https://imgur.com/IQF6nQT](https://imgur.com/IQF6nQT)
In the same way, the early part of the run it was very beneficial to have that process cause they couldn't easily sell after purchase. So by the time the ease of internet platforms came around, it was already crazy high returns and it's only gone higher and higher. I dont know if I could be a multi millionaire, but knowing in the back of your head that you're safe unless Apple turns rotten probably has got to be freeing
tell me about it. back in 2021 i took profits on DVN after like 10%. if i held it would have been nearly 100% or more. it sucks, but ehhh, green is green right. same happened to me this year with NU. but who can tell the future right?
too many times have we both watched tickers go up and back down, and wish we "traded it"
I was playing the market like a casino back then. In the long run, I am proud that I made a pick that made me ten thousand in two weeks on an investment of less than a grand, it was a penny stock. After the dotcom crash, I realized I had to get serious about making some retirement money. I have stuck with mutual funds at Vanguard and State Street since then and let smarter people sweat the details. It worked out well, I retired at 58 a few years ago when I closed down a small company I had that serviced school districts.
Well that’s how you never “hit the big one.” Personally I always have a heavy % of portfolio into a single “pre-planned” strategy. Yes takes some time and research but if your patient it will pay off. Although I’m not talking about years but months with long dated options. When they are due, it can be an entire quarters worth of profit.
The simple answer is probably. I would be a 401k millionaire if I hadn't cashed out my 401k in the 90s to start a business... than went out of business.
If you were tech savvy, E-trade started around 1991? I remember my mom trading online on the Schwab platform around 96 using the TC 2000 screener software.
You wouldn't necessarily have become an easy millionaire, though. The dot-com crash and GFC wiped a lot of companies out, so even if you got lucky and stuck with Apple and Microsoft, you also had a fair chance of getting stuck with stinkers like JDS Uniphase or Worldcom.
I was in business school when they crested. But Microsoft was just about to release Windows 95! Of course, us geekier guys insisted on running on Windows NT.
I don’t remember when I first signed up for eTrade. But I do remember selling my NVDA stock in 2014 for the down payment on my Subaru.
Im not using eTrade any more, but I’m now in my third iteration of holding NVDA. I bought a bunch in December after seeing the AI chatbot in action. When it doubled in about a month, I sold enough to cover my original investment, but still holding onto the remaining shares of NVDA. I track my holdings in a spreadsheet. I make a note of my purchases and what my strategic justification for the purchase was. My note for retaining the remaining shares was “don’t want to bet against NVDA.”
JDS Uniphase was literally the plumbing of the fiber internet! Everyone was going to use the internet! It was just going to grow and grow! Then everyone realized that it was just a plumbing commodity company in an industry where the Googles and Amazons were going to capture all the value. Kinda reminds me of a other similar hardware maker now that’s getting a lot of hype, starts with an N.
I almost bought 5 Bitcoin when it was $20. I almost put $100k on TSLA when it was $20 (adjusted for splits) and the same for NVDA and AAPL when they were much lower.
The reality is that I would have 100% sold my Bitcoin once it hit $200 each thinking I made a killing and cashed out any of the risky stocks once I had doubled my money.
Still haunted occasionally by how I almost went all-in on TSLA at the lowest point, around $12 in the summer of 2019. Nobody supported my reckless idea at the time. All I needed was a little encouragement as I was too afraid to put everything on the line.
I graduated with a masters in AI/ML in June 2015. I got an offer in September 2015 from AMD for $100k RSU and $110k starting salary; I took a "better" offer elsewhere.
AMD was ~$1.80 then, which means about 55k shares. It'd be on a 4 year vest, so I wouldn't be able to dump it even if I wanted to. Not to mention annual refreshes.
I like where I work now, but that's a cool $7m+.
> It'd be on a 4 year vest, so I wouldn't be able to dump it even if I wanted to
4 years is typically the vesting schedule for the full grant, but it’s very rare that you wouldn’t have been able to touch any of it during those 4 years. I’ve had grants that are like 25% after 1 year then evenly over 36 months, and ones that are straight quarterly.
And the companies that make it big can still be called out as scams and failures the entire time despite rising revenue and market cap (cough Tesla). The wisdom of the crowds is just completely useless when it comes to stock news, and price.
The way you make money with deep research is figure out a company that does something that works, but everyone else believes it doesn't. Then pray you were actually right and wait for the market to realise it, then they realise it and become way way over confident and that's your 10x right there. The problem is; everyone is telling you it doesn't work and the company is a scam, so you have to actually judge the underlying product somehow independently of the news and info that's generally available.
ah well we all get old eventually, at least you'll be able to soften the blow with those piles of cash :)
Not that I would consider 40 old, maybe your lifestyle is making you feel worse, idk I'm just a dumb 26 year old, good luck to you
I don’t know about etfs, but buying individual equities in promising companies in the 90s and early aughts is what I did, and it worked out well for me. Some of the companies failed or merged or didn’t grow much, but the ones that succeeded grew so much that the failures are tiny by comparison.
I bought like $280 worth of bitcoin sometime around 2011 to buy some dumb shit from some shady site based out of Europe. I think one coin was like $11 or something.
I had like 0.8 bitcoin on some mining pool Website in 2012.
Back then, I didn't bother to cash out these 10$ and stopped mining as I calculated that energy in my country was more expensive than the value of those coins.
Well this side didn't exist anymore in 2019. They must have ran with my money or got hacked, idk.
I begged my dad to buy like $500 worth when it was $30. I barely made enough to pay for gas to college at the time, but a year later I bought one for $100, and lost 2/3rds between being a shitty "trader" and btc-e getting seized.
In theory, the remaining 1/3rd still exists on a Dell optiplex 740's 80gb HDD in our closet.
My wife has regularly suggested we throw out that old PC, then I'll tell her it's worth $5k, or $25k, or $11k or whatever, then she's like "oh right my bad".
Edit to add - my dad did not buy.
If you were using Bitcoin Core to house the BTC extraction is as easy as copying the wallet.dat file and Importing it into Bitcoin Core on a new PC. The Blockchain is considerably bigger than it was before, probably somewhere near 750gb-1tb of HDD space would be required to download it.
The stock market sounds easy in hindsight but when you're dealing with real life shit, an uncertainty in the economy, and just other overall circumstances, it's unpredictable.
Like right now, you could buy a company that in ten years, could see 10x return. Those companies exist but finding them is the question.
Even when you find them, most people don't have the mental fortitude to hold long-term. Like I'm sure many of us who bought Apple at some point decided to take profit and sold and bought back at a higher price because they're just too damn good of a company to not have any shares from.
Apple netted 10x return the past decade. $100k would have turned into $1 million. That could change most people's life just based off of that one decision. When you have a great company at a low cost basis, you gotta give it patience to see the ultimate reward.
Just need to save up $10k, dump it into one stock that 10x to $100k, then dump that into another stock that 10x, and you have your $1m. Anyone can do it. /s
The problem is easy money. Before QE, you could analyze a companies financials, products and overall macro and make a sound investment. When QE started, you just went into index funds and overweight tech. With Covid money printer, the signals don’t make sense. They make less sense when you see a Fed balance sheet still above $8 trillion and slowly dropping, with rates above 5%, inflation, and strong consumer spending. It’s too much information to process. Then also add in the retail investors investing based on emotion and you have weird runs and support levels that aren’t justified.
If you had bought and held and added say $1000 a month yes easily.
Today the issue is that the VC landscape has somewhat overtaken small cap investing. Back in the 90s, the VC industry was much smaller and pre sarbanes oxley, the cost of going public was lower, which allowed smaller companies to go public and allow normal investors to participate in gains.
These days, VC money is plenty up to $10b in value, keeping the gains in the private markets.
Yeah I think apple went public 18 months after releasing the Apple II. Yahoo went public 18 months after founding. But then again, a lot of these were profitable or could have been if they wanted to be at IPO. When you look at an Uber or AirBNB which struggle with profitability close to 15 years after founding, it’s a different ballgame.
Most of the small guys evaporated. The famous Cathie Wood was First Leader of XXX had 65 to 85% return every year. XXX was internet of things from First Leader funds, semiconductor and bio managed by Kevin forget his last name. Saw him last year, his funds now are a lot more conservative after leared not to be too aggressive.
If I hadn't gambled a bunch of my business earnings on the market I could have easily used that money to make millions. Grinding back from that mistake still haunted me.
The S&P 500 has returned roughly 10x excluding dividends in the past 30 years. Anyone who diligently saved, invested, and held the S&P 500 over that period could very possibly become a multi-millionaire over that period.
Only if I had at least 100k back then. Why? Because SPY launched in 1993 and if you held from 1993 till now you’d have 10x your money. It went from $43 to $420 today at close.
Now investing in individual stocks that’s where the real money is made. If you had put $100k in NVDA in 1999 on IPO you would have about $47 million.
I remember thinking of buying McDonald's stock when I worked there as a burger flipper in 2000. Even as a high school kid, I was interested in stocks, but I didn't have the knowhow. If I had loaded up then, it would be at least a 1000%+ return plus dividends by now.
lol, yeah, was just making a joke, buying stocks by calling your broker and reading the stock section of the newspaper was common up until the late 2000's. Used to do it with my dad in high school. Stocks were done this way mostly unchanged for almost 100 years.
You're never too late to invest in a good business. I made millions when I decided to buy AMD at $3 in 2016. I understood back then that AMD had one last shot to save itself. And all indications were pointing to them actually succeeding with their Zen architecture. This transformed the company and the rest is history. It was not without the risk, but nothing is without risk.
Invest in what you know, and invest in what's valued fairly. Be patient and you can make money in this market. You're not always going to win, but you only need a few good opportunities to make it. Warren Buffet talks about this all the time. You just need to find that one business you understand and you think is undervalued. And you only need to do it a few times in your lifetime. So turn down opportunities you don't understand.
I was lucky in the sense that I followed hardware closely for many years. And I understand that business well. But if you know of a sector that you understand (perhaps your own industry), you can have a leg up on wall-street.
Investing was perhaps easier back then in the 90s. Because there was less information available and algo trading wasn't as big. So if you really did the legwork you could have found bargains. But at the same time. The wealth of information available today, including various boards on reddit where you can bounce ideas with other folks with similar interests also has its advantages.
We are going through a sort of a recession right now, even though it's hard to tell. But I think there are tons of bargains out there.
Man I bought AMD back in 2017 for $13/share just based on crypto-adjacency. A top 3 best performer over that time for sure. Unfortunately it was only 25 shares 😭
No. Only a novice would say they have a leg up on Wall Street because they know the product of a business well. You don’t think Wall Street analysts don’t know a business well? That’s what they literally get paid a lot of money to do. They have all the same sources you do plus more and they can move markets.
The success of a retail investor in individual stocks can primarily be attributed to luck.
> No. Only a novice would say they have a leg up on Wall Street because they know the product of a business well. You don’t think Wall Street analysts don’t know a business well? That’s what they literally get paid a lot of money to do. They have all the same sources you do plus more and they can move markets.
I'm the original commenter. Wall Street Analysts don't have the domain knowledge necessary to analyze a business at a deep level someone intimately familiar with the business has. For instance one thing that made me invest in AMD so heavily was finding out that Zen had uOp cache and that Jim Keller (a legendary leader in this field rejoined AMD), and that Jim's team worked on building tools which can let AMD's designers model power use at an early stage before the design was completed. Do you think analysts understand processor architecture to this degree? They don't. Do you think Analysts knew that Zen could have a huge uplift in performance while also being very power efficient giving Intel run for its money in the data center? I highly doubt it. Everyone wrote off AMD's chances.
Analysts never understood this. It took AMD actually showing positive Earnings results before the stock started moving. They never acted on the actual underlying details of the business. They only raised their PTs once AMD started making money again.
Peter Lynch talks about this phenomenon in his book One Up On Wallstreet.
Peter who has managed one of the most successful funds ever. Makes precisely the same point I made.
He gives an example of Dunkin Donuts, which he felt was undervalued. He went to the stores and realized that people weren't going there for donuts, instead they loved DD coffee. He noticed that more people were lining up at Dunkin each morning for their great coffee. He then realized that the street was undervaluing this company because they didn't see this potential in it. It was one of his best trades.
Finally I am not going to say luck didn't play a part in it. It did. AMD had to execute on these great ideas and I was lucky they did. I did not foresee Intel fumbling as bad from that point on either. But every gain has a component of risk and luck in it. But it was an educated investment. Not a lucky play. And I think everyone is capable of beating Wallstreet Analysts. Analysts analyze and rate these companies from a different perspective, they aren't engineers. An individual investor only needs one or two of these opportunities so an individual investor has the ability to understand the business at a much deeper level than an analysts can.
I agree all of it comes down to luck- the original comment leads in with the big winner of AMD's turn-around. If Wall Street analysts can't consistently beat the market, how does any one person expect? They have to be very lucky and have some inkling of knowledge. But even the inkling of knowledge dwarfs the sheer luck of putting it on one number at a roulette table and it miraculously ends up hitting. There's good bets with insider/industry knowledge, but it's not infallible
That's the trick though to generating wealth long-term without trading. You just buy good companies and continually add to your portfolio while having a career. Selling and flipping things also triggers capital gains taxes, whereas if you don't sell, you just pay taxes on your dividends. The snowball effect kicks in if it is well-balanced. You just hold through the ups and downs. It is practically easy, but emotionally difficult not to take profits. But in the long-term you save money by not paying capital gains.
The best way to become a multi-millionaire is to have a decent job where the 401k matching is good (1:1 matching up to 10% is very good) and consistently max out the 401k contribution.
After 30 years, you'll get 3 million. I am walking this math and on track for that 3 mil mark. If I can do it, most others should be able to do the same.
I was offered a job at MSFT in 1986. I did not take it; most people get stock options while there but spend their shares buying houses etc. few people get rich.
In the 90's you had mutual funds which ideally could hunt down those stocks that would eventually turn into big returns, but by then enough data had been accumulated to show mutual funds tend to underperform because their managers didn't pick stocks well and charged a substantial charge for doing so.
That's when eTrade and the like became popular because it allowed "normies" to hunt down and pick stocks....at which point data was accumulated to show they were just as bad, or worse, than the mutual fund managers.
(Almost) every single "big return" stock looks obvious in hindsight, but (almost) none of them look so at the time (people were saying MSFT was overpriced at $100 after a nice run, yet here it is at $330+). Which is why ETF's became a thing. They guarantee you get a piece of the next biggest thing. If you're trying to look to the 90's for finding the best of tomorrow, good luck, but frankly I think it a Sisyphean task.
stock research was on the newspaper ticker page, maybe the barber had a WSJ subscription. would need to call a broker to make a trade.. if you knew one.
A small cap ETF would sell their shares once the company isn’t small anymore. They would have been more likely to have held from 1996 to 2000, not 2023.
You can take out the 401k from your last employer when you turn 55. Many people who want to retire at 55 Xfer their IRA/401k from the previous employers to the current one and use the rule of 55 to retire early.
Well you have a great chance right now..carnival went to 1993 levels..many other examples of companies crushed recently. 3m at 2014 levels..dominion at 2014..Disney destroyed.. just a matter on if they make it and you can hold it. Rocket mortgage at 75% down..idk they are out there it’s just scary stuff. Hospital reits destroyed..
And plenty of fud to come im sure.
I have several of those. I mined 50 bitcoin in about 20 minutes like 12 years ago. Lost the hard drive. I once bought and sold the parabolcic Tesla run of ‘19 or early ‘20, 75 shares for s $2,500 before the 5:1 split. I cashed out some AMZN calls before earnings that would have netted me about $200k.
It happens
maybe not millionaire,but well off.
in the summer of 1996, I settled insurance for a car wreck.
a guy at work said you should invest.
"microsoft has win 95, gonna be big"
intel, etc
apple.. I watched that one go by at its last time ever, to see 22 cents. I think I needed AOL and etrade or something.. 1998.
I was a bit nerdy, I also volunteered to run fiber optic at the university.. summer job, also 1996. Tech was my thing.
The reason that guy at work mentioned invest.. we were talking of the stock market one day. Early 90s. I told him about my group winning in the 6th grade over that coca cola story of their "new coke" faking the market a bit. A lot like today...with a lot of companies.
We spoke of the internet...some day trading across the wires.
when I think of these things.. I think of my paternal grave on iceland. Dated 850CE.
he did not call the new land america... he only found it, and sailed away...
Nah..you don't need to go back that far...
Recently, I saw a post on wsb of someone who invested in nvidia in 2016... his average price is about 11 bucks a share and he holds 4400 shares...
Its always easy to point out path to millionaire/billionaire with hindsight... but really most people would close their position at 10% 50% or even 100% gain. It takes a certain kinda madness/forgetfulness to hold through it all for 23-33 years..
Also, market rules apply for every successful company there is like 999 that fail...
So
1. ETFs didn’t exist in the 90s, it was more mutual funds
2. All companies start as a small cap even before they go public
3. It’s amazing what time can do for returns, the biggest key is to continually be invested regardless the strategy.
I vividly remember seeing Elon's 12 billion net worth at lunch during high school, that combined with the 30 Bitcoin I had at the time would've been easy millions
i'm sure i would have cashed out after seeing things like 50-100% gains on individual stocks. definitely wouldn't have held out for 5,000% runs.
This is it. At one point I would get nervous and take a 2 or 300% gain and miss out on the long play that stocks like Apple did. Had one back in the 90s that made me a quick ten grand in two weeks so I bailed. Three weeks later it would have been a $130,000 profit. That one still haunts me on occasion.
If it helps, I couldn’t pull the trigger on an options trade that turned into 6200% gain in a matter of days. That one really hurts me.
Maybe that careful instinct about risky options saved you money at other times?
OUCH! Options are way over my head. I read about them and don't understand a thing.
Glad to read this; same here. Not interested in losing with my luck. Still, with some good investments and luck I've managed to acquire several million dollars in spite of some drastic drops in the market and in stocks I purchased. I've had most success with stocks that were innovative - Shockwave (SWAV); IRythm (IRTC) - or were making a change - Celsius (CELH) - or were placed well Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in a growing area. Examples from more recent plays...
They aren’t terribly complicated. The best way to use them is as a hedge. Basically, if you own 100 shares or more of something, you sell a call option that is slightly OTM, or ATM with a strike that is somewhat above your entry price for the stock. That way, if it rockets you earn some gain on the sale of stock plus the premium. If it doesn’t go ITM, you keep the stock and premium and if if tanks, you still keep the premium and lose less on paper.
>The best way to use them is as a hedge. Absolutely not, *and* the example you gave is like the worst hedge ever on top of that? A short call on a long underlying is hardly any hedge at all, and caps gains on a capital-intensive position for pennies on the dollar. At first you said hedge and I was thinking a long put, y'know, a tail risk hedge, an actual hedge? But a short call (not even on a pmcc but a full fledged 100 shares position)? Huh? Did you trade in 2022? Did you try this little trick then? Because one short call into a bloody week and you're *deep* outside your cost basis with no way to claw back to the green, especially if you're capping your upside with short calls. The wheel is an outmoded and weak overall options strategy, full stop. I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. The *best* use of options? It's to buy stocks at half price. A deep itm latest-date-possible LEAPS provides you a .95+ delta exposure position at half (or less!) the price of buying the actual equity. And guess what? If your choice of equity downturns over 50% and makes your option expire worthless? Think of it as a free stop out on your typical 100 shares position, keeping you from losing what more you would lose with a 'non-synthetic' long position. Usually I charge but that tip is free, just for you pal. Lever yourself. Brush ya hair. Good luck.
I think dude must be confused or something lol.
The guy described a covered call. I agree that's the best use of options for the average investor.
This is my friend's TSLA few years before position, he bought it around 45 range, still holding it [https://imgur.com/fALZG5w](https://imgur.com/qsrHb9c) Another friend's AAPL position, not sold even single one yet [https://imgur.com/IQF6nQT](https://imgur.com/IQF6nQT)
What’s crazy is how the process of buying shares were when they bought vs now
In the same way, the early part of the run it was very beneficial to have that process cause they couldn't easily sell after purchase. So by the time the ease of internet platforms came around, it was already crazy high returns and it's only gone higher and higher. I dont know if I could be a multi millionaire, but knowing in the back of your head that you're safe unless Apple turns rotten probably has got to be freeing
Does your friend have a single daughter in her mid 60's?
tell me about it. back in 2021 i took profits on DVN after like 10%. if i held it would have been nearly 100% or more. it sucks, but ehhh, green is green right. same happened to me this year with NU. but who can tell the future right? too many times have we both watched tickers go up and back down, and wish we "traded it"
And what did you learn from it? You still selling your winners?
I was playing the market like a casino back then. In the long run, I am proud that I made a pick that made me ten thousand in two weeks on an investment of less than a grand, it was a penny stock. After the dotcom crash, I realized I had to get serious about making some retirement money. I have stuck with mutual funds at Vanguard and State Street since then and let smarter people sweat the details. It worked out well, I retired at 58 a few years ago when I closed down a small company I had that serviced school districts.
Only sell half
I never learned that. I'm a bonehead.
Well that’s how you never “hit the big one.” Personally I always have a heavy % of portfolio into a single “pre-planned” strategy. Yes takes some time and research but if your patient it will pay off. Although I’m not talking about years but months with long dated options. When they are due, it can be an entire quarters worth of profit.
The simple answer is probably. I would be a 401k millionaire if I hadn't cashed out my 401k in the 90s to start a business... than went out of business.
Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.
If you were tech savvy, E-trade started around 1991? I remember my mom trading online on the Schwab platform around 96 using the TC 2000 screener software. You wouldn't necessarily have become an easy millionaire, though. The dot-com crash and GFC wiped a lot of companies out, so even if you got lucky and stuck with Apple and Microsoft, you also had a fair chance of getting stuck with stinkers like JDS Uniphase or Worldcom.
Imagine having bought AOL when they were big...
and AOL was huge back then. I think more people expected Apple to go bankrupt than AOL in the 90s.
It's hard to remember how marginalized Apple was in the 90s. You rarely saw a Macintosh.
Shout-out to all my early 2000s kids who's first experience with an Apple device was the G3.
Hell yeah. AOL looked utterly unstoppable, especially when it bought Time Warner
I was in business school when they crested. But Microsoft was just about to release Windows 95! Of course, us geekier guys insisted on running on Windows NT.
Windows 2000 with the NT kernel was great! All the 9x apps and DirectX but the stability of NT.
Imagine buying AOL at their peak. Would've beat all my biggest losses.
I don’t remember when I first signed up for eTrade. But I do remember selling my NVDA stock in 2014 for the down payment on my Subaru. Im not using eTrade any more, but I’m now in my third iteration of holding NVDA. I bought a bunch in December after seeing the AI chatbot in action. When it doubled in about a month, I sold enough to cover my original investment, but still holding onto the remaining shares of NVDA. I track my holdings in a spreadsheet. I make a note of my purchases and what my strategic justification for the purchase was. My note for retaining the remaining shares was “don’t want to bet against NVDA.”
Fantastic story
Cramer shilled JDSU all the time back then lol
JDS Uniphase was literally the plumbing of the fiber internet! Everyone was going to use the internet! It was just going to grow and grow! Then everyone realized that it was just a plumbing commodity company in an industry where the Googles and Amazons were going to capture all the value. Kinda reminds me of a other similar hardware maker now that’s getting a lot of hype, starts with an N.
That’s exactly why you buy and hold index funds. To never miss another AAPL or NVDA
If I could predict the future I'd just buy a lottery ticket instead of waiting for the market.
but then the other person who could predict the future would mug you
Then I'd predict the mugging, change which lottery I play.....oh God, life just got complex and I didn't even win for real.
[I knew that would happen](https://youtu.be/LAf0QnLFS7Q)
Ask Enron employees that
I almost bought 5 Bitcoin when it was $20. I almost put $100k on TSLA when it was $20 (adjusted for splits) and the same for NVDA and AAPL when they were much lower. The reality is that I would have 100% sold my Bitcoin once it hit $200 each thinking I made a killing and cashed out any of the risky stocks once I had doubled my money.
I bought like hundreds of bitcoin back at those prices. Spent It on drugs and now I have to work an actual job to make a living.
Still haunted occasionally by how I almost went all-in on TSLA at the lowest point, around $12 in the summer of 2019. Nobody supported my reckless idea at the time. All I needed was a little encouragement as I was too afraid to put everything on the line.
I don’t understand why people sell their winners. It hurts returns in the long term.
This is why u bought them in the first place And not being able to see the future u never know if they gonna continue to win
Bubbles is why
I graduated with a masters in AI/ML in June 2015. I got an offer in September 2015 from AMD for $100k RSU and $110k starting salary; I took a "better" offer elsewhere. AMD was ~$1.80 then, which means about 55k shares. It'd be on a 4 year vest, so I wouldn't be able to dump it even if I wanted to. Not to mention annual refreshes. I like where I work now, but that's a cool $7m+.
> It'd be on a 4 year vest, so I wouldn't be able to dump it even if I wanted to 4 years is typically the vesting schedule for the full grant, but it’s very rare that you wouldn’t have been able to touch any of it during those 4 years. I’ve had grants that are like 25% after 1 year then evenly over 36 months, and ones that are straight quarterly.
Yes, which balances it out with annual refreshes that would be inevitable.
[удалено]
And the companies that make it big can still be called out as scams and failures the entire time despite rising revenue and market cap (cough Tesla). The wisdom of the crowds is just completely useless when it comes to stock news, and price. The way you make money with deep research is figure out a company that does something that works, but everyone else believes it doesn't. Then pray you were actually right and wait for the market to realise it, then they realise it and become way way over confident and that's your 10x right there. The problem is; everyone is telling you it doesn't work and the company is a scam, so you have to actually judge the underlying product somehow independently of the news and info that's generally available.
No, companies get kicked out of small cap ETFs when they're not small cap anymore.
I have 2 10x baggers, but I only had 10k to invest in each of them at the time. V and AAPL
"Only" ... bro why do you have to hurt me like this
consolation is he's probably old
I was in my mid 20s then and just started working. I'm 40 now but feel way older lol
ah well we all get old eventually, at least you'll be able to soften the blow with those piles of cash :) Not that I would consider 40 old, maybe your lifestyle is making you feel worse, idk I'm just a dumb 26 year old, good luck to you
I was fine until I had 2 kids 😂😭
Still nice
The best stocks and the worst stocks looked the same 30 years ago.
I don’t know about etfs, but buying individual equities in promising companies in the 90s and early aughts is what I did, and it worked out well for me. Some of the companies failed or merged or didn’t grow much, but the ones that succeeded grew so much that the failures are tiny by comparison.
We read ticker quotes the next morning in the newspaper, it was a very different world and retail investors weren’t really much of a thing back then
wouldn’t a small cap ETF have to sell when a stock becomes too big to be a small cap?
I had for about 20$ of bitcoin in early 2010.... my HDD crashed, and I toss it away... without backups FML
I bought like $280 worth of bitcoin sometime around 2011 to buy some dumb shit from some shady site based out of Europe. I think one coin was like $11 or something.
I feel your pain..
I had like 0.8 bitcoin on some mining pool Website in 2012. Back then, I didn't bother to cash out these 10$ and stopped mining as I calculated that energy in my country was more expensive than the value of those coins. Well this side didn't exist anymore in 2019. They must have ran with my money or got hacked, idk.
One of my employees came in my office and tried to talk to me about btc when it was .10. I couldn't get him out of my office fast enough.
Are they retired now, or did they fail to hodl?
I begged my dad to buy like $500 worth when it was $30. I barely made enough to pay for gas to college at the time, but a year later I bought one for $100, and lost 2/3rds between being a shitty "trader" and btc-e getting seized. In theory, the remaining 1/3rd still exists on a Dell optiplex 740's 80gb HDD in our closet. My wife has regularly suggested we throw out that old PC, then I'll tell her it's worth $5k, or $25k, or $11k or whatever, then she's like "oh right my bad". Edit to add - my dad did not buy.
If you were using Bitcoin Core to house the BTC extraction is as easy as copying the wallet.dat file and Importing it into Bitcoin Core on a new PC. The Blockchain is considerably bigger than it was before, probably somewhere near 750gb-1tb of HDD space would be required to download it.
The stock market sounds easy in hindsight but when you're dealing with real life shit, an uncertainty in the economy, and just other overall circumstances, it's unpredictable. Like right now, you could buy a company that in ten years, could see 10x return. Those companies exist but finding them is the question. Even when you find them, most people don't have the mental fortitude to hold long-term. Like I'm sure many of us who bought Apple at some point decided to take profit and sold and bought back at a higher price because they're just too damn good of a company to not have any shares from. Apple netted 10x return the past decade. $100k would have turned into $1 million. That could change most people's life just based off of that one decision. When you have a great company at a low cost basis, you gotta give it patience to see the ultimate reward.
‘Most people’ don’t have $100k to dump into 1 stock to get $1mil, to begin with.
Just need to save up $10k, dump it into one stock that 10x to $100k, then dump that into another stock that 10x, and you have your $1m. Anyone can do it. /s
Easy
The problem is easy money. Before QE, you could analyze a companies financials, products and overall macro and make a sound investment. When QE started, you just went into index funds and overweight tech. With Covid money printer, the signals don’t make sense. They make less sense when you see a Fed balance sheet still above $8 trillion and slowly dropping, with rates above 5%, inflation, and strong consumer spending. It’s too much information to process. Then also add in the retail investors investing based on emotion and you have weird runs and support levels that aren’t justified.
If you had bought and held and added say $1000 a month yes easily. Today the issue is that the VC landscape has somewhat overtaken small cap investing. Back in the 90s, the VC industry was much smaller and pre sarbanes oxley, the cost of going public was lower, which allowed smaller companies to go public and allow normal investors to participate in gains. These days, VC money is plenty up to $10b in value, keeping the gains in the private markets.
Yeah I think apple went public 18 months after releasing the Apple II. Yahoo went public 18 months after founding. But then again, a lot of these were profitable or could have been if they wanted to be at IPO. When you look at an Uber or AirBNB which struggle with profitability close to 15 years after founding, it’s a different ballgame.
Most of the small guys evaporated. The famous Cathie Wood was First Leader of XXX had 65 to 85% return every year. XXX was internet of things from First Leader funds, semiconductor and bio managed by Kevin forget his last name. Saw him last year, his funds now are a lot more conservative after leared not to be too aggressive.
If I hadn't gambled a bunch of my business earnings on the market I could have easily used that money to make millions. Grinding back from that mistake still haunted me.
Microsoft spent about a decade trading around $30-$40 following the DotCom bubble. It was basically like a utility.
The S&P 500 has returned roughly 10x excluding dividends in the past 30 years. Anyone who diligently saved, invested, and held the S&P 500 over that period could very possibly become a multi-millionaire over that period.
Only if I had at least 100k back then. Why? Because SPY launched in 1993 and if you held from 1993 till now you’d have 10x your money. It went from $43 to $420 today at close. Now investing in individual stocks that’s where the real money is made. If you had put $100k in NVDA in 1999 on IPO you would have about $47 million.
Maybe if my broker removes the sell button for safety purposes.
I remember thinking of buying McDonald's stock when I worked there as a burger flipper in 2000. Even as a high school kid, I was interested in stocks, but I didn't have the knowhow. If I had loaded up then, it would be at least a 1000%+ return plus dividends by now.
Buying stocks back then was much harder and more uncommon for the average everyday American.
[удалено]
Besides their 401k, the average American isn't buying stocks *now*.
With what? A landline phone and some kinda daily paper with stock ticker info on one of the pages? Sounds made up
[удалено]
lol, yeah, was just making a joke, buying stocks by calling your broker and reading the stock section of the newspaper was common up until the late 2000's. Used to do it with my dad in high school. Stocks were done this way mostly unchanged for almost 100 years.
Disagree. Buy stock in company you use and trust a lot. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft have been this for many with long term vision.
You're never too late to invest in a good business. I made millions when I decided to buy AMD at $3 in 2016. I understood back then that AMD had one last shot to save itself. And all indications were pointing to them actually succeeding with their Zen architecture. This transformed the company and the rest is history. It was not without the risk, but nothing is without risk. Invest in what you know, and invest in what's valued fairly. Be patient and you can make money in this market. You're not always going to win, but you only need a few good opportunities to make it. Warren Buffet talks about this all the time. You just need to find that one business you understand and you think is undervalued. And you only need to do it a few times in your lifetime. So turn down opportunities you don't understand. I was lucky in the sense that I followed hardware closely for many years. And I understand that business well. But if you know of a sector that you understand (perhaps your own industry), you can have a leg up on wall-street. Investing was perhaps easier back then in the 90s. Because there was less information available and algo trading wasn't as big. So if you really did the legwork you could have found bargains. But at the same time. The wealth of information available today, including various boards on reddit where you can bounce ideas with other folks with similar interests also has its advantages. We are going through a sort of a recession right now, even though it's hard to tell. But I think there are tons of bargains out there.
Man I bought AMD back in 2017 for $13/share just based on crypto-adjacency. A top 3 best performer over that time for sure. Unfortunately it was only 25 shares 😭
Man, great comment.
No it really isn’t. This guy had no more insight than anyone else that’s not an insider. Just a hope and luck choosing the right horse in the race.
You sound like a big hater to me.
No. Only a novice would say they have a leg up on Wall Street because they know the product of a business well. You don’t think Wall Street analysts don’t know a business well? That’s what they literally get paid a lot of money to do. They have all the same sources you do plus more and they can move markets. The success of a retail investor in individual stocks can primarily be attributed to luck.
> No. Only a novice would say they have a leg up on Wall Street because they know the product of a business well. You don’t think Wall Street analysts don’t know a business well? That’s what they literally get paid a lot of money to do. They have all the same sources you do plus more and they can move markets. I'm the original commenter. Wall Street Analysts don't have the domain knowledge necessary to analyze a business at a deep level someone intimately familiar with the business has. For instance one thing that made me invest in AMD so heavily was finding out that Zen had uOp cache and that Jim Keller (a legendary leader in this field rejoined AMD), and that Jim's team worked on building tools which can let AMD's designers model power use at an early stage before the design was completed. Do you think analysts understand processor architecture to this degree? They don't. Do you think Analysts knew that Zen could have a huge uplift in performance while also being very power efficient giving Intel run for its money in the data center? I highly doubt it. Everyone wrote off AMD's chances. Analysts never understood this. It took AMD actually showing positive Earnings results before the stock started moving. They never acted on the actual underlying details of the business. They only raised their PTs once AMD started making money again. Peter Lynch talks about this phenomenon in his book One Up On Wallstreet. Peter who has managed one of the most successful funds ever. Makes precisely the same point I made. He gives an example of Dunkin Donuts, which he felt was undervalued. He went to the stores and realized that people weren't going there for donuts, instead they loved DD coffee. He noticed that more people were lining up at Dunkin each morning for their great coffee. He then realized that the street was undervaluing this company because they didn't see this potential in it. It was one of his best trades. Finally I am not going to say luck didn't play a part in it. It did. AMD had to execute on these great ideas and I was lucky they did. I did not foresee Intel fumbling as bad from that point on either. But every gain has a component of risk and luck in it. But it was an educated investment. Not a lucky play. And I think everyone is capable of beating Wallstreet Analysts. Analysts analyze and rate these companies from a different perspective, they aren't engineers. An individual investor only needs one or two of these opportunities so an individual investor has the ability to understand the business at a much deeper level than an analysts can.
I agree all of it comes down to luck- the original comment leads in with the big winner of AMD's turn-around. If Wall Street analysts can't consistently beat the market, how does any one person expect? They have to be very lucky and have some inkling of knowledge. But even the inkling of knowledge dwarfs the sheer luck of putting it on one number at a roulette table and it miraculously ends up hitting. There's good bets with insider/industry knowledge, but it's not infallible
Oh you’re one of those.
Also back then if you remember you have to pay for every trade you made, unlike today.
I owned 20k shares of amd when it was $2... I just recently lost 120k betting on a reit to recover. Had I done nothing for the last 15 years...
I had 200 shares of amd at $9. Sold at $14. I'm a winner!! Not multi millionaire, but would have been nice
Buying 30+ years is not easy.
That's the trick though to generating wealth long-term without trading. You just buy good companies and continually add to your portfolio while having a career. Selling and flipping things also triggers capital gains taxes, whereas if you don't sell, you just pay taxes on your dividends. The snowball effect kicks in if it is well-balanced. You just hold through the ups and downs. It is practically easy, but emotionally difficult not to take profits. But in the long-term you save money by not paying capital gains.
Went all in on AAPL in 2007 when the iPhone came out. Had I invested in them when I bought the first iPod in 2002, man.
The best way to become a multi-millionaire is to have a decent job where the 401k matching is good (1:1 matching up to 10% is very good) and consistently max out the 401k contribution. After 30 years, you'll get 3 million. I am walking this math and on track for that 3 mil mark. If I can do it, most others should be able to do the same.
I was offered a job at MSFT in 1986. I did not take it; most people get stock options while there but spend their shares buying houses etc. few people get rich.
I became a 401(k) millionaire at the end of 2021, but the Fed decision to fight inflation has reduced my portfolio value by 30%…
In the 90's you had mutual funds which ideally could hunt down those stocks that would eventually turn into big returns, but by then enough data had been accumulated to show mutual funds tend to underperform because their managers didn't pick stocks well and charged a substantial charge for doing so. That's when eTrade and the like became popular because it allowed "normies" to hunt down and pick stocks....at which point data was accumulated to show they were just as bad, or worse, than the mutual fund managers. (Almost) every single "big return" stock looks obvious in hindsight, but (almost) none of them look so at the time (people were saying MSFT was overpriced at $100 after a nice run, yet here it is at $330+). Which is why ETF's became a thing. They guarantee you get a piece of the next biggest thing. If you're trying to look to the 90's for finding the best of tomorrow, good luck, but frankly I think it a Sisyphean task.
stock research was on the newspaper ticker page, maybe the barber had a WSJ subscription. would need to call a broker to make a trade.. if you knew one.
A small cap ETF would sell their shares once the company isn’t small anymore. They would have been more likely to have held from 1996 to 2000, not 2023.
Sure. I could have invested everything in AIG in ~2008 when it was $0.15 during the crash. Spoiler: I did not.
I made $4 million in my 401k doing that. 1 more year and I can dip into it,
You can take out the 401k from your last employer when you turn 55. Many people who want to retire at 55 Xfer their IRA/401k from the previous employers to the current one and use the rule of 55 to retire early.
I didn’t know that. Thanks.
Could have been an easy millionaire with my NVDA options if I had been willing to risk 40-50k
If u were born before 1970 in America and bought a house in the Silicon Valley Cali you are almost for sure a millionaire due to crazy house prices.
Etf was "invented" in 2008/2009
Nope. Even if ETFs had existed, a small cap etf would have sold out of the stock once it became too big for the index.
You would’ve cashed out once it returned 50%.
Current market is uninvestible. Institutions are using big techs to hold up indices. Reversal will come. We are not in a qe environment
Well you have a great chance right now..carnival went to 1993 levels..many other examples of companies crushed recently. 3m at 2014 levels..dominion at 2014..Disney destroyed.. just a matter on if they make it and you can hold it. Rocket mortgage at 75% down..idk they are out there it’s just scary stuff. Hospital reits destroyed.. And plenty of fud to come im sure.
I have several of those. I mined 50 bitcoin in about 20 minutes like 12 years ago. Lost the hard drive. I once bought and sold the parabolcic Tesla run of ‘19 or early ‘20, 75 shares for s $2,500 before the 5:1 split. I cashed out some AMZN calls before earnings that would have netted me about $200k. It happens
I saw gme at 12 and overstock at 3 I could have been
maybe not millionaire,but well off. in the summer of 1996, I settled insurance for a car wreck. a guy at work said you should invest. "microsoft has win 95, gonna be big" intel, etc apple.. I watched that one go by at its last time ever, to see 22 cents. I think I needed AOL and etrade or something.. 1998. I was a bit nerdy, I also volunteered to run fiber optic at the university.. summer job, also 1996. Tech was my thing. The reason that guy at work mentioned invest.. we were talking of the stock market one day. Early 90s. I told him about my group winning in the 6th grade over that coca cola story of their "new coke" faking the market a bit. A lot like today...with a lot of companies. We spoke of the internet...some day trading across the wires. when I think of these things.. I think of my paternal grave on iceland. Dated 850CE. he did not call the new land america... he only found it, and sailed away...
Hrmmmm…… ok
Yes. Just buy real estates and don’t bother about stock
Apple stock
Nah..you don't need to go back that far... Recently, I saw a post on wsb of someone who invested in nvidia in 2016... his average price is about 11 bucks a share and he holds 4400 shares... Its always easy to point out path to millionaire/billionaire with hindsight... but really most people would close their position at 10% 50% or even 100% gain. It takes a certain kinda madness/forgetfulness to hold through it all for 23-33 years.. Also, market rules apply for every successful company there is like 999 that fail...
Not really if you kind of know what you are doing! 😝😂
Went all in on a crypto and thought it was the one that would beat the rest… that coin is XRP smh
Loading RKLB and SLdP and hold for 10 years or better
So 1. ETFs didn’t exist in the 90s, it was more mutual funds 2. All companies start as a small cap even before they go public 3. It’s amazing what time can do for returns, the biggest key is to continually be invested regardless the strategy.
I vividly remember seeing Elon's 12 billion net worth at lunch during high school, that combined with the 30 Bitcoin I had at the time would've been easy millions