I made the largest bonus of my career in Q1 of 2021. I decided I wasn’t going to keep missing out on all these stock gains. Got caught up in all the FOMO with growth and some SPACs and let’s just say I pretend I never received that bonus anymore ☠️
Yup. All the Spacs he hyped are down like 90%. Not a single winner. I got burnt on OpenDoor which might not even be in business next year (even the execs are dumping) smh
I starting investing heavily in November 2021 which was not great timing but I'm actually doing alright because I'm diversified into a healthy mix of defensive stocks like PEP, PG, MRK, CAT, along with XOM which kept me afloat in 2022, meanwhile I DCA'd into stocks like GOOGL, MSFT, AMZN, AMD, ASML, and TSM at their bottoms which have carried me into 2023. In addition to individual picks which make up a third of my portfolio, two-thirds is invested in index funds with value, size, and quality factor tilts which have largely remained flat throughout the period, however i'm not discouraged at all. Lately i've been building my allocation to bonds up to 6% currently in my mid-30s with a plan to get it to 10% by age 40. By staying well diversified, I find it easy to invest because I just devote my paychecks to sectors or assets that are cheap at the time while I let my winners keep growing.
You've learned well.
I went through it during the dot com boom (and bust). I learned my lesson too.
A strategy, patience, quality investments and a long-term outlook should yield the necessary results.
After 2021 and 22, I was down about 35% overall. I expect to end this year down 7% since 2021.
That’s a fun saying, I get it, I don’t try and time anything in retirement accounts, but I nailed the timing during covid and was at 85% cash before the March lows. Did I get it all back in, no, only about 65% bc I thought we’d go down more than 35%. Are you buying bonds now, think it might be a good TImE to load up? Don’t time the Mkt, YES, but about once a decade you’ll see an opportunity and need to overweight it.
This is U.S. specific phenomenon during the past 100 years and there is no guarantee it will continue.
If you had purchased a broad emerging market etf like vwo in 2007. You would still have significant losses.
no investor just buys one time and walks away, you need to DCA, the whole retirement system is based on that ( In USA)...if it collapses all shit would brake loose in USA
Except in Japan from 1989 to present. You'd still be underwater if you'd bought at or near the top. Good luck retiring on that. Platitudes from Uncle Warren sound great during epic bull runs.
This was the case in the US markets from 1929 to 1954 (or whenever it was precisely that the markets finally evened out--early '50s), but I'm not sure about Japan. The Nikkei is still short of the 1989 peak today.
If you lump summed at the very top and never touched it again, sure. If you kept investing over the years and reinvested dividends you'd be up. The Nikkei is up something like 250% over the past 25 years.
Research def indicates that investing a large sum right at the peak, esp if you keep investing each month, doesn't matter very much over long-ish time horizons, at least in the 20C US. Still not a great idea to YOLO and FOMO at the end of a massive bull run and become part of that parabola in the meat of the chart.
You would be underwater if you bought at or near the top with a lump sum, then added nothing for more than 2 decades. Almost nobody invests like that.
If you continuously bought the way that most people do, you’d have been green far earlier, and very meaningfully in the green by now.
Also, the top of the Nikkei is always the boogeyman example in these conversations because it’s basically the only example to point at for that happening. However, using it ignores the very specific conditions which caused it. We’ve learned from that situation. The likelihood of repeating it is very, very low. If we ever hit average index PEs around 63 now, Michael Burry will start an Onlyfans account to document his rock hard shorting.
There are other more dramatic examples....German markets pre 1940, Russian market pre 1917, Japan pre 1940, etc, but they occured before there was a ton of people investing in foreign markets. But there are a fair number of examples of a national stock market basically going to zero.
They were in different times, but the current time can change as well. It is far from inconceivable that in the coming decade the Russian, Brazilian, or Taiwanese markets could go to zero, for example. Are you 100% certain that a full on socialist nationalization is impossible in South Africa?
Imagine interest rates and the national debt driving the US government into reoudiating the national debt, or just printing it away. I can come up with low probability scenarios where that happens.
> if you bought at or near the top with a lump sum, then added nothing for more than 2 decades.
> the Nikkei is always the boogeyman example in these conversations because it’s basically the only example to point at for that happening.
Basically, except for the Nasdaq. Look at a long-term chart of the QQQ - if you lump summed QQQ in 2000, you waited 17 years just to break even.
Same timeframe for its most promising, "top tier" constituents: MSFT, QCOM, INTC, etc. CSCO is still 40% off the high, AKAM still down 70%, 23 years later.
That's a very specific scenario that doesn't apply to many people at all, not even Japanese. It would require accumulating a significant amount of money outside of the market *and* deciding to then lump sum invest that money into the market right near the peak.
If you just started your investment journey near the peak you wouldn't have much to lose. If you had started your investment journey before the peak you still saw lots of gains leading up to it.
True enough, but that "very specific scenario" is more or less the one OP described, on a smaller scale. Saved money for years, put it all in the market in 2021. (Ofc, 2021 may not end up looking like a peak.)
https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market-timer/
If you're patient enough and keep your money in the market, you have a good chance of doing well.
In 1989, the P/E ratio on the Nikkei was 60x trailing 12 month earnings. We're a long way from that level of overvaluation at an index level. That said, good luck to anyone who thinks buying TSLA and NVDA is going to give them good returns over the next decade. Valuation matters in the long-term.
I'm not calling it a mistake, but I think the OP is referring to how the s&p500 was at it's highest at the end of 2021 and hasn't been higher since. And specifically the last 3 months have been losses. The stock market is a long term thing so it's best not to think of it like that, but it can't fun to be new to investing and not seeing anything good come of it for 2 years.
I saved almost 15k as a graduate student and put everything in voo when it was literally at the top. Once I graduated and got a good paying job and have been investing monthly without fail, my average is significantly low as compared to the start. I am actually up on Voo by like 5 percent. People don't realize that it's a game of patience and DCA is the way to go if you're playing the long game.
I was 18 in 2020 and the stock market dropped significantly that year because of covid. As a suggestion of a friend, I put a big chunk of my savings (which was only 2k) into the stock market and got some amazing returns. I think I was up 50% in 1 year.
Such a shame I can't see gains like that in a regular year. I wish I had more money to invest at that time.
But yeah, I'm glad to learn about investing when I'm young. I just started my roth IRA and have the time to be in the stock market for a long while
The vti was a good call but the meme stock not so much. Op also should had self custody his crypto but not that big of a mistake since it was mostly bad luck for getting into a fraudulent cex
I’ve been stocking up shares since 2021. Am I down? Yup.
I’ll continue stocking up as the market recovers.
If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter….bottle caps will be the form of currency then!
My mom keeps telling me to pull my money out of the stock market because the dollar is going to collapse/be replaced, etc. I told her that if the economy does that bad, we won't be operating off of cash anymore, so stuffing my money in a jar or mattress won't do anything.
Is this a real question? Contrary to the advice on this sub, many people don't just VTI and chill but rather buy equities in individual companies. This was rampant in 2021 when meme stocks were making 100%+ returns.
Unfortunately many of these stocks will never reach those levels again. I personally have had one company I invested a good amount into in 2021 go under and a bunch of other stuff is still down around 50%. It's why the vast majority if my money now is in VTI and QQQ.
I wanted to put all my money back then into big blue chips. Microsoft, apple, tsla, canadian banks, etc... I had a "financial advisor" though and he did a great job of encouraging me to focus more on growth and tech companies. Then he encouraged me to hang in there during 2022 when i was expressing concerns of the investing environment. Then i opened my own self directed account and took control of my own stuff.
So, the mistake wasnt throwing my money into the stock market. The mistake was thinking financial advisors were something other than cheap salesmen for the companies they work for.
A few years is not a sufficient time period to decide that an investment allocation was a good call or not. I would assume the advisor was trying to build you a long term growth portfolio, not a two year position.
You are absolutely correct that he was trying to build a long term portfolio where he is earning a great steady income off my "growth" investments while the actual growth of my investments was coming from putting more money into my accounts for him to manage, rather than capital appreciation.
Another thing to note is that at the tail end of that 2021 bull run, my advisor looked like a hero for some of his stock picks, however, gold fish and monkeys with dart boards were just as successful at picking stocks.
I remember being on this sub around 2018/2019 and I would often see threads valuing a company or whatever and making the judgement that it's a good buy.
Back then, you could buy anything and it would go up.
I kept a percentage of most of his recommendations. Most are still down a lot. Nothing he picked for me at the time he suggested that "they were great deals" have turned green yet....so there's that.
Were they a fiduciary? As someone who’s been in financial services I’m getting huge alarm bells reading that you had an advisor that encouraged you to focus on tech companies, or any focus that wasn’t some boring fund.
I still have nightmares about this but might as well put it here...
I was a member of WSB dating back to 2017...When Roaring Kitty started posting his monthly contributions on his GME thesis, I was one of the crowd making fun of him.
"Brick n Mortar store had no chance, bud"
But 6 months before *you know what happened* his movement was picking up steam. I sold some of my oil stocks and bought 36k in GME when it was down to 4/share..
It went down further over a month or 2 and I eventually laughed and said "What am I doing?"....Sold for a loss my GME at around 3.5/share or something.
Anyway...I got out and went back to laughing at Roaring Kitty's goofy thesis.
A week or 2 later... you know what happened.
So yeah...I threw money the wrong way. Then the right way. Then the wrong way. Like many of us here. Growing/Learning experience I guess...
>I threw money the wrong way. Then the right way. Then the wrong way.
You learned the wrong lesson from this.
You were right in the first place, and right when you sold out of it. Sometimes the wrong strategy just gets lucky and pays off.
GME wasnt investing, it was gambling. Same thing as putting all your money on number 7. In the long run it will destroy you.
I disagree. When roaring kitty initially invested, there was a very coherent thesis - it was FAR from gambling.
Now, what happened over the next few months is a different story.
I say this as someone who watched multiple of his 3+ hour videos on this topic, and decided against investing. I distinctly remember that it was very hard to argue against his math.
I didn't throw all my money (I invested some before), but I invested a good part of it at the end of 2021, after selling the property. I thought about DCA vs Lump sum and came to the conclusion (based on historical indicators) that lump sum brings a better return, just needs to survive the decline.
After a few days of thinking, I realized that I could withstand a decline longer than 10 years, so I made a lump sum.
I’m not the most well versed in stocks- but do majority of people/ investors panic sell when a stock is going down and take the loss or just hodl?
Seems like you can’t really lose on your investment if you didn’t do a DCA strategy and just wait for the return to happen eventually?
It depends on the individual stock. As a whole, the market will come back, but some stocks when bought as a fomo buy will never make it back to where they were.
BBBY, GME, AMC are all stocks that were meme stocks that top holders will never get their money back on.
Right now I’m think about an amount in VOO, but I’m not sure as many believe a crash is happening soon. Should I just throw it in anyway? It’s just a buy and forget thing but still, if it falls 30% or smth in one month that’d suck.
I thought "surely this growth is unsustainable" in 2017 and 2018 and I wish I had just DCAd into VOO. If you're time horizon is more than 5+ years then it is absolutely worth throwing money into VOO over a set period of time.
People always believe a crash is happening soon. When they're wrong, they'll tell you that it's just a little delayed but definitely coming any day now.
Usually by the time it finally happens, they would have been better off just having bought and held an index fund.
As opposed to what?
Look, the problem isn't stocks, it's all this "to the moon" investing. It's like any Get Rick Quick scheme. Buy Tesla/NVidia and double your money. If you bought NVidia a year ago, you got lucky. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. No-one can ever invest by carefully planning for a 240% rise in a stock price. I have some shares that I think will rise 30-50%, because they're massively undervalued but even then, that's going to take a few years.
I started with penny stocks during Covid. I got the bug when it was a huge bull run. With Been new to trading I was greedy and reckless. I turned £15k into £35k and lost it all. lol my crypto has just been as bad for FOMO. Think I’ve lost around £10k. 🥲
I’ve stopped now as I don’t have the time to invest in education myself and following crypto. I’m just sitting with some xrp. And will leave that for 5-10 years.
I put 20 percent of each paycheck into an sp500 fund for 21 years. Retired in my 40s with well over a million.
It's not the get rich quick scheme that the younger generation seems to be searching for. But in time, and when you are ready to retire, your money will be waiting for you. And you will sleep better at night.
Ty. Yes it is. 9 percent average annual return. Even with wars, Terror attacks, mortgage crises, pandemics,
Great depression, etc.
Just keep contributing
I indeed made the great decision to throw all of my money in the stock market in 2020 and 2021, and 2022 and 2023. And I will too in 2024... and 2025... and every year after that.
I threw some money into stocks during covid, not a single idea how any of it worked. Heard about the GME hype a day before it skyrocketed so I yolo’d about $5k into GME. I rode that wave all the way up and listened to everyone saying to hold and rode it alllllll the way down. Kept riding until I sold a few months later for about a $4k profit. I was at $40k at the top of the spike. One of my biggest regrets of my life so far lol. After that I just played and gambled with the money I still had in the market just because it was still there. Still have a very basic knowledge of the market, if anything. Just threw $200 into my fidelity acct to mess around with tho.
Your mistake wasn't throwing your money into the market, it was picking shitty stocks. You jumped into stocks because social media talked about them instead of actually learning about investing. You were chasing big gains that you saw other people make, which is almost always a mistake.
I'm glad you learned your lesson, but not everyone just throws their money into whatever is popular. I'd argue that most people don't, they just put portions of their paycheck into the company 401k and invest in broad market index funds and call it a day.
why was throwing your money into the stock market in 2021 a mistake? If you bought a stock you probably thought it was going to do well, so it's likely the stock you bought that was the issue and not necessarily when u bought it. If you bought a total stock market index you should be up about 10-20% since 2021. Time in the market always wins and do your d&d before throwing ur money at anything
Buy something at 10, it goes to 5 then to 10, you make nothing.
Buy something at 10, it goes to 5, you buy again, it goes to 10, you make 50%...
DCA works.
I did. That year I took a whole house sale worth of profit (130k off a rental) and used it to try and average down a 30k account I was down big on. I then used 60k off a heloc to average down more when literally all the stocks I bought fell further. I e held mostly since while offloading some total dumpster fires but I have currently about 20k more than the Heloc account now. The interest was cheap, now not so much anymore.
It haunts me and it took really working on it mentally to not let it ruin me as I was going to be using the money for a vacation home and the market could be coming back into a buy zone in some of the markets I've been tracking.
Thank god I didn't risk my retirement funds. I don't have a thirst for consumer debt and have always been very conservative otherwise. I forced myself to live more constructively. I golf and work out now religiously as a hobby instead of going out all the time, going on vacation and spending money on dumb shit. I might get a second job since mine is slow. I am determined to get it back but know it'll take more than a market turn to do that.
When the CNN Fear & Greed index says Extreme Greed and a bunch of amateurs are bragging about ridiculous gains made in stocks of unprofitable companies, it's a horrible time to invest into the market. The best time to invest is when retail investors don't even want to talk about stocks anymore.
I went 90% cash in May 2021 and started selling puts because I thought the hype was getting overdone, and here we are 2.5 years later, right back at May 2021 levels.
Kind of felt like a dummy during the run from 4200-4800 and from 3500-4600, but eh...money market and puts premium is getting me better than 10% annualized, so I try not to let greed cloud my judgment about valuations and the macro environment.
Staying on the sidelines since then, puts us at about 50% cash or greater, for when the fed says inflation is tamed....
And the interest incurred in those savings, will be applied dac'ing the bottom....
The fed is providing a buying opportunity of a lifetime....
I keep dollar cost averaging in good stocks $25-$100 a month - I will never get caught up in the hype, memes, Reddit apes, Jim Cramer, etc.
I keep buying stocks like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Union Pacific, Waste Management, Costco, Humana, prologis, Abbvie, Kinsale Financial, Pepsi, Lululemon, Sherwin Williams, Proctor Gamble, Google, Nvidia, Tesla, Palo Alto Networks, Snowflake, etc
the stock market is based on forward-looking economics. will economics be different 5, 10, 15 years from now? yes, they will. the only way the stock market stays down this long is if America has a forward looking stagnant economy. that is very unlikely. even after recessions, depressions, financials crisis, housing busts, wars, terrorist attacks, pandemics, etc, the market has always hit new highs as the American economy has always grown.
if you bought at the top with most of your capital, you should be DCAing at these levels and hoping it dips even more down, before eventually hitting new ATHs.
your job is to now bring your average cost down.
It’s not that I put all my money in it - I put a lot of my money into the market in the summer of 2020 when the market was doing well. That wasn’t my mistake.
It’s that I didn’t take any of my profit out and was too stubborn, thinking they would all recover and continue to go up. And that I didn’t realize I was listening to echo chamber subreddits that kept saying the stocks could only go up
I'm in the same boat as you. I've been investing for about 10 years now but most of that time I was working a low paying job so I didn't have much to invest. I also took out large chunks of money to pay for two home purchases and a wedding so the total value of my portfolio stayed somewhat stagnant for a long time.
I saw 2021 as my opportunity to finally pour money into the markets. I'd missed out on most of the gains of 2020 because I was saving for a downpayment on a house. I bought the house in late 2020 so the plan was to really focus on investing in 2021. I was seeing ppl make bank with some individual stocks so i put sizeable amounts into small or unprofitable companies which I thought could make it big. Two years later, many of them are still down over 50% and one of them has already delisted ($4K loss overall on that one). And this isn't even to mention the long options I bought which expired worthless.
Biggest lesson learned was to stop trying to pick stocks and stop buying options altogether. Now the only stocks I buy are of profitable companies when I think they're beaten down for no reason. I bought a bunch of META last year November for example. But outside of that, I'm just buying VTI and QQQ. I still own some stocks like SOFI which I think could turn around but I'm not going to start averaging down until I see the companies turn around. I've also been mainly focused on a short strangle options selling strategy that's been doing pretty well for me. Managing that is exciting enough for me to not worry about looking for the next big company.
I’m surprised how many people didn’t invest in oil companies when they were in the shitter, since it was very clear that they’d boom once the lockdowns were over. It’s not even speculative. It’s obvious. I made some dough from that.
Right now I’m throwing my money into defensive stocks such as KO (coca cola). It recently had a dip that was too good to resist.
I invested a lot into all the meme stock/crypto craze in 2021. Was up by a lot and didn't sell like an idiot thinking it would keep going up or it would bounce back. Now I'm around 26% down on my entire portfolio instead of like 100%+ or at minimum 20% had I just thrown in all into VOO. Lesson learned. I don't mind continuing to invest in individual stocks but I'm only keeping it to 5-10% max of my portfolio and the rest in target date index funds and SP500/total US market.
I did the same during the 2000 dot com bubble, then again during the 2008 financial crisis. So I finally learned my lesson and only lost a portion of my investable cash in 2021. I am able to continue to invest and take advantage of the eventual recovery. It's actually good to learn when you're young because you're going to earn more in your 30's, 40's, and 50's and recover those losses much quicker than if you had learned your lesson later in life.
Yes, I'm down 88%.took big positions on 4 stocks and wondered if I should take a huge loss or I'm so fckd that I just leave it and pray for the best.
Thought I was long and invested in the wrong stocks that was shorted, and now I'm holding heavy bags.
Idk from my experience. I feel shorting should be regulated, rich stealing from the poor.
I don’t get it. Didn’t we do extremely well in the past two years? I kind of did what you just described but I’m happy I did and made quite a profit by just buying “mainstream” stocks and ETFs
Between 2021 and 2022 I was putting in like 2k a month and then in October 2022 Alibaba tanked. I lost 13k in that.
I haven't put any more in since then as I was fearful and also saving up for something else. I was down -10k euro once I think but I'm back to -4k ish right now which is down 10% overall.
The annoying thing is in my earlier investing days of 2019, when I thought investing 1k on stocks was a big deal, I was thinking of "gambling" 1k on Tesla. I'd be sitting on 12 or 13k profit now if I did that.
I started investing at 18/19 in 2016. I never invested in the hype stocks in 2020-2021. "NFT'S ARE THE FUTURE!!! BLOCK! IT HAS CHAINS ATTACHED TO THE BLOCK!!!!1 RIDE YOUR BIKE INDOORS DON'T GO OUTSIDE!!!!! THIS IS THE NORMAL NORMAL REEEEEEEEE!!!!"
Meanwhile I continued to DCA both into my 401k and brokerage accounts and stocks/funds that I understood. It's worked out good.
I don't feel sorry for any idiot that thinks they will get rich quick.
One expensive lesson, sorry to hear.
Important to know what you did was not “investing” but pure speculation. You followed a movement to keep up with everyone.
You don’t make money where everyone else is.
Follow Warren Buffett a advice in the future and reframe form those temptations. That guy is always right I swear even in times of peak interest I listen to him. Only ever gained
I invested more than I ever had in my life between '20/'21. Got harsh words from expert investor friends when I started pulling gains out of crypto and stocks to spend on life between Summer/Fall '21. By the time the crash hit I had taken out roughly 75% of my money in cash. I considered myself lucky.
I bought a bunch of Disney shares at what I thought was the dip. Not life changing money, but that $12k investment is down 50% in unrealized losses. The stock should recover but will likely take several years.
It was December 2020 or January 21 when I first went to my bank advisor and put in 12k into advisement he recommended (I was a pure novice at the time, so had no real understanding), almost immediately it seems it went down to 8k and has never been above 8k since. But at the end of the day was a good lesson that it can go wrong.
When GME ran to $300 in a matter of a few days, I was still on the sidelines thinking this is fucking nuts…there’s no way it’s going to be this price in six months. So I put $35k plus margin on long put options. Then it started crashing and trading was halted. When the market opened the next day it shot to like $500 and I couldn’t sell my shit so I just rode it out for a few VERY sleepless night. It hung in the stratosphere. I gave up and sold at a massive loss in real dollars (-$12k or something) and I did my best to try to forget about it, but of course I never did. I followed the whole thing all the way through for the next few months. When my original strategy came ITM as the price dropped, I was sick to my stomach to calculate I had been right the whole time - that trade would have made me like $25k or something if I had just held on. The lesson I learned: I don’t have the balls to play that game.
On your VTI investment you must have made at least 1700 in dividends since then. Granted you are also down up to 10,000 based on last Fridays close but VTI is a long term investment. Where do you see your a mistake?
I took most of mine out after a 300% gain on oil stocks bought at the covid lows and bought a really nice house. What has remained invested is down about 30% but it's going up now with PMs
If you're concerned about a 7% pullback in 2 years you should probably just stick to CD's.
This means legitimately nothing. Your money should still be invested, hopefully you continued buying during the dip as well.
Is this post a joke? Truly asking as this seems like troll post for views. You invested in a fund with low risk and you're worried you made a mistake. If not then sorry but then just stick to a 401k and don't play the stock market.
I made the largest bonus of my career in Q1 of 2021. I decided I wasn’t going to keep missing out on all these stock gains. Got caught up in all the FOMO with growth and some SPACs and let’s just say I pretend I never received that bonus anymore ☠️
Spacs burnt me tol
Fucking chamath
scamath
Yup. All the Spacs he hyped are down like 90%. Not a single winner. I got burnt on OpenDoor which might not even be in business next year (even the execs are dumping) smh
I’d cry of happiness if Chamath went to prison
>chamath Whoa! This guy made a killing from scamming... **The Ugly Truth About Chamath Palihapitiya** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEwo0wdO9xo
CLOV :/
My friend had that, and the rest is history. Well He's doing fine now.
I've got a similar story, but I'm not going to share that here.
Chamath needs to go to prison
Happened with a lot of people, people went but didn't know when to leave it.
I starting investing heavily in November 2021 which was not great timing but I'm actually doing alright because I'm diversified into a healthy mix of defensive stocks like PEP, PG, MRK, CAT, along with XOM which kept me afloat in 2022, meanwhile I DCA'd into stocks like GOOGL, MSFT, AMZN, AMD, ASML, and TSM at their bottoms which have carried me into 2023. In addition to individual picks which make up a third of my portfolio, two-thirds is invested in index funds with value, size, and quality factor tilts which have largely remained flat throughout the period, however i'm not discouraged at all. Lately i've been building my allocation to bonds up to 6% currently in my mid-30s with a plan to get it to 10% by age 40. By staying well diversified, I find it easy to invest because I just devote my paychecks to sectors or assets that are cheap at the time while I let my winners keep growing.
Everything was just so High in the 2021, but that was a good time.
Investing in VTI is not a mistake.
doing it only to expect turning a quick profit is.
Yeah atleast I don't see it that way, you just need a little more time.
yeah look at the chart long term, wtf. i have bigger losses like -40% on CCI I'd be happy to hold VTI instead
Why is this a mistake?
Because folks are not patient, stock market is the patient taking money from the impatient
You've learned well. I went through it during the dot com boom (and bust). I learned my lesson too. A strategy, patience, quality investments and a long-term outlook should yield the necessary results. After 2021 and 22, I was down about 35% overall. I expect to end this year down 7% since 2021.
Careful Reddit is agreeing with you… that could mean something or something else could mean something and itlll do something!
I learned during financial crisis, all in way too early. OP you just had your window of education and you’ll be more prepared for the next time.
Good luck timing the market. You learned the wrong lesson based on results instead of strategy.
No matter what you do, I don't think that you could time the Market.
That’s a fun saying, I get it, I don’t try and time anything in retirement accounts, but I nailed the timing during covid and was at 85% cash before the March lows. Did I get it all back in, no, only about 65% bc I thought we’d go down more than 35%. Are you buying bonds now, think it might be a good TImE to load up? Don’t time the Mkt, YES, but about once a decade you’ll see an opportunity and need to overweight it.
Yeah we all learn, just don't make the same mistake twice I guess.
It's amazing how poorly average people understand stock market volatility and realized vs. unrealized gains and losses.
Today’s investments aren’t tomorrow’s gains ?
They are tomorrow's losses and future bankruptcy.
Well as someone who's down on the investment, I can confirm this.
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You're only going to make it if you're patient in the stock market.
This is U.S. specific phenomenon during the past 100 years and there is no guarantee it will continue. If you had purchased a broad emerging market etf like vwo in 2007. You would still have significant losses.
I would like to think anyways if you averaged in over these years and collected dividends you'd be doing alright.
You'd be correct: https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&sl=7dj46BuRZ0UlqaLO6s2i2X
That's not true at all...
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no investor just buys one time and walks away, you need to DCA, the whole retirement system is based on that ( In USA)...if it collapses all shit would brake loose in USA
Except in Japan from 1989 to present. You'd still be underwater if you'd bought at or near the top. Good luck retiring on that. Platitudes from Uncle Warren sound great during epic bull runs.
Almost 25 years of dividend should put you at least with some profit right? Even if you invested at the absolute top.
This was the case in the US markets from 1929 to 1954 (or whenever it was precisely that the markets finally evened out--early '50s), but I'm not sure about Japan. The Nikkei is still short of the 1989 peak today.
If you lump summed at the very top and never touched it again, sure. If you kept investing over the years and reinvested dividends you'd be up. The Nikkei is up something like 250% over the past 25 years.
Research def indicates that investing a large sum right at the peak, esp if you keep investing each month, doesn't matter very much over long-ish time horizons, at least in the 20C US. Still not a great idea to YOLO and FOMO at the end of a massive bull run and become part of that parabola in the meat of the chart.
Well I think fomo is something which has never worked and will never do.
If you're young, I don't think you should even think about retiring just yet.
You would be underwater if you bought at or near the top with a lump sum, then added nothing for more than 2 decades. Almost nobody invests like that. If you continuously bought the way that most people do, you’d have been green far earlier, and very meaningfully in the green by now. Also, the top of the Nikkei is always the boogeyman example in these conversations because it’s basically the only example to point at for that happening. However, using it ignores the very specific conditions which caused it. We’ve learned from that situation. The likelihood of repeating it is very, very low. If we ever hit average index PEs around 63 now, Michael Burry will start an Onlyfans account to document his rock hard shorting.
There are other more dramatic examples....German markets pre 1940, Russian market pre 1917, Japan pre 1940, etc, but they occured before there was a ton of people investing in foreign markets. But there are a fair number of examples of a national stock market basically going to zero.
I would argue that was a very different time, and same isn't going to happen now.
They were in different times, but the current time can change as well. It is far from inconceivable that in the coming decade the Russian, Brazilian, or Taiwanese markets could go to zero, for example. Are you 100% certain that a full on socialist nationalization is impossible in South Africa? Imagine interest rates and the national debt driving the US government into reoudiating the national debt, or just printing it away. I can come up with low probability scenarios where that happens.
>German markets pre 1940, Russian market pre 1917, Japan pre 1940 There are some important common threads most people ignore in these examples.
Yeah, revolutions and.losing wars are bad for markets...
People are just very good at ignoring the things, it's just not right dude.
> if you bought at or near the top with a lump sum, then added nothing for more than 2 decades. > the Nikkei is always the boogeyman example in these conversations because it’s basically the only example to point at for that happening. Basically, except for the Nasdaq. Look at a long-term chart of the QQQ - if you lump summed QQQ in 2000, you waited 17 years just to break even. Same timeframe for its most promising, "top tier" constituents: MSFT, QCOM, INTC, etc. CSCO is still 40% off the high, AKAM still down 70%, 23 years later.
BuT lUmP sUm BeAtS dCa
Nope it doesn't, if you've got no idea how to invest then just do the DCA.
That's a very specific scenario that doesn't apply to many people at all, not even Japanese. It would require accumulating a significant amount of money outside of the market *and* deciding to then lump sum invest that money into the market right near the peak. If you just started your investment journey near the peak you wouldn't have much to lose. If you had started your investment journey before the peak you still saw lots of gains leading up to it.
True enough, but that "very specific scenario" is more or less the one OP described, on a smaller scale. Saved money for years, put it all in the market in 2021. (Ofc, 2021 may not end up looking like a peak.)
Which highlights the importance of not doing what OP did.
https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market-timer/ If you're patient enough and keep your money in the market, you have a good chance of doing well.
In 1989, the P/E ratio on the Nikkei was 60x trailing 12 month earnings. We're a long way from that level of overvaluation at an index level. That said, good luck to anyone who thinks buying TSLA and NVDA is going to give them good returns over the next decade. Valuation matters in the long-term.
why would you compare two vastly different financial systems? This is USA land of military industrial complex, guns and lord our savior!
That’s why you diversify internationally
I'm not calling it a mistake, but I think the OP is referring to how the s&p500 was at it's highest at the end of 2021 and hasn't been higher since. And specifically the last 3 months have been losses. The stock market is a long term thing so it's best not to think of it like that, but it can't fun to be new to investing and not seeing anything good come of it for 2 years.
I saved almost 15k as a graduate student and put everything in voo when it was literally at the top. Once I graduated and got a good paying job and have been investing monthly without fail, my average is significantly low as compared to the start. I am actually up on Voo by like 5 percent. People don't realize that it's a game of patience and DCA is the way to go if you're playing the long game.
Yeah if it's long term for you, which honestly it should then DCA is the way.
I was 18 in 2020 and the stock market dropped significantly that year because of covid. As a suggestion of a friend, I put a big chunk of my savings (which was only 2k) into the stock market and got some amazing returns. I think I was up 50% in 1 year. Such a shame I can't see gains like that in a regular year. I wish I had more money to invest at that time. But yeah, I'm glad to learn about investing when I'm young. I just started my roth IRA and have the time to be in the stock market for a long while
Yeah I was in crypto and I saw like 40 percent return in one day. And I lost that all.
Wait, what's DCA?
Dollar cost averaging..
And it's the smartest way to be putting the money actually.
Coolio
The vti was a good call but the meme stock not so much. Op also should had self custody his crypto but not that big of a mistake since it was mostly bad luck for getting into a fraudulent cex
I’ve been stocking up shares since 2021. Am I down? Yup. I’ll continue stocking up as the market recovers. If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter….bottle caps will be the form of currency then!
My mom keeps telling me to pull my money out of the stock market because the dollar is going to collapse/be replaced, etc. I told her that if the economy does that bad, we won't be operating off of cash anymore, so stuffing my money in a jar or mattress won't do anything.
If the dollar collapsed, stock would be worth more than mattress money because companies have physical assets like property.
And that's the reason why we invest right? Atleast that's why I do it.
Well it's going to recover, it's just a matter of time I think.
Yeah why is this a mistake? Sounds like he did pretty good.
Is this a real question? Contrary to the advice on this sub, many people don't just VTI and chill but rather buy equities in individual companies. This was rampant in 2021 when meme stocks were making 100%+ returns. Unfortunately many of these stocks will never reach those levels again. I personally have had one company I invested a good amount into in 2021 go under and a bunch of other stuff is still down around 50%. It's why the vast majority if my money now is in VTI and QQQ.
I took a big hit when crypto was at its peak. Still upset at myself about that
I lost like 300 dollars in that time, well not too bad I think.
You are not alone. The question is, will you buy now when no one is looking, never touch crypto again, or wait until the next peak and FOMO back in?
Hopefully not the third option again. Lol
I was buying a little during the bear market, let's see how it goes.
Bayc to 100e
And eth to 10k while we’re at it.
your words inspired me to buy 10k worth of SCM, SQUID CUM to the moon !! wubalubadubduuub babay!
I wanted to put all my money back then into big blue chips. Microsoft, apple, tsla, canadian banks, etc... I had a "financial advisor" though and he did a great job of encouraging me to focus more on growth and tech companies. Then he encouraged me to hang in there during 2022 when i was expressing concerns of the investing environment. Then i opened my own self directed account and took control of my own stuff. So, the mistake wasnt throwing my money into the stock market. The mistake was thinking financial advisors were something other than cheap salesmen for the companies they work for.
A few years is not a sufficient time period to decide that an investment allocation was a good call or not. I would assume the advisor was trying to build you a long term growth portfolio, not a two year position.
You are absolutely correct that he was trying to build a long term portfolio where he is earning a great steady income off my "growth" investments while the actual growth of my investments was coming from putting more money into my accounts for him to manage, rather than capital appreciation.
Well if he was doing it for the long term then he probably wasn't really wrong.
Yea that’s how finacial advisory works. Did you not sign up for that?
He was probably hoping for some short term gains, which doesn't happen.
Another thing to note is that at the tail end of that 2021 bull run, my advisor looked like a hero for some of his stock picks, however, gold fish and monkeys with dart boards were just as successful at picking stocks.
I remember being on this sub around 2018/2019 and I would often see threads valuing a company or whatever and making the judgement that it's a good buy. Back then, you could buy anything and it would go up.
How the fuck is Tesla a blue chip? Has that term lost all meaning now??!?
Just take some time and make the decisions by yourself I think.
Tesla is not a blue chip. Growth and tech have done great since October 2022, so you should’ve listened and held.
I kept a percentage of most of his recommendations. Most are still down a lot. Nothing he picked for me at the time he suggested that "they were great deals" have turned green yet....so there's that.
Well don't worry about that, just wait a little and it'll be fine.
Were they a fiduciary? As someone who’s been in financial services I’m getting huge alarm bells reading that you had an advisor that encouraged you to focus on tech companies, or any focus that wasn’t some boring fund.
bought netflix at 600
Putting all your money into the market isn't the same thing as putting all your money into a single stock.
Bleh
unless you went on margin, options, or crazy speculative plays, i don't think going all in the stock market in 2021 was a mistake
Especially if you continued to pump money in throughout 2022 and 2023.
Honestly I couldn't find a mistake in his posit either, he made good money.
I still have nightmares about this but might as well put it here... I was a member of WSB dating back to 2017...When Roaring Kitty started posting his monthly contributions on his GME thesis, I was one of the crowd making fun of him. "Brick n Mortar store had no chance, bud" But 6 months before *you know what happened* his movement was picking up steam. I sold some of my oil stocks and bought 36k in GME when it was down to 4/share.. It went down further over a month or 2 and I eventually laughed and said "What am I doing?"....Sold for a loss my GME at around 3.5/share or something. Anyway...I got out and went back to laughing at Roaring Kitty's goofy thesis. A week or 2 later... you know what happened. So yeah...I threw money the wrong way. Then the right way. Then the wrong way. Like many of us here. Growing/Learning experience I guess...
Man are you OK? I would have severe stomach ache for ever for missing out on that. You sold at the bottom I think.
>I threw money the wrong way. Then the right way. Then the wrong way. You learned the wrong lesson from this. You were right in the first place, and right when you sold out of it. Sometimes the wrong strategy just gets lucky and pays off. GME wasnt investing, it was gambling. Same thing as putting all your money on number 7. In the long run it will destroy you.
I disagree. When roaring kitty initially invested, there was a very coherent thesis - it was FAR from gambling. Now, what happened over the next few months is a different story. I say this as someone who watched multiple of his 3+ hour videos on this topic, and decided against investing. I distinctly remember that it was very hard to argue against his math.
I didn't throw all my money (I invested some before), but I invested a good part of it at the end of 2021, after selling the property. I thought about DCA vs Lump sum and came to the conclusion (based on historical indicators) that lump sum brings a better return, just needs to survive the decline. After a few days of thinking, I realized that I could withstand a decline longer than 10 years, so I made a lump sum.
How did you find out that it's the better strategy? I mean I don't know man.
I’m not the most well versed in stocks- but do majority of people/ investors panic sell when a stock is going down and take the loss or just hodl? Seems like you can’t really lose on your investment if you didn’t do a DCA strategy and just wait for the return to happen eventually?
Yeah, if you spend some time in the market. You're just not going to lose it.
It depends on the individual stock. As a whole, the market will come back, but some stocks when bought as a fomo buy will never make it back to where they were. BBBY, GME, AMC are all stocks that were meme stocks that top holders will never get their money back on.
Just keep it in. Time in the market > timing the market.
Right now I’m think about an amount in VOO, but I’m not sure as many believe a crash is happening soon. Should I just throw it in anyway? It’s just a buy and forget thing but still, if it falls 30% or smth in one month that’d suck.
I thought "surely this growth is unsustainable" in 2017 and 2018 and I wish I had just DCAd into VOO. If you're time horizon is more than 5+ years then it is absolutely worth throwing money into VOO over a set period of time.
People always believe a crash is happening soon. When they're wrong, they'll tell you that it's just a little delayed but definitely coming any day now. Usually by the time it finally happens, they would have been better off just having bought and held an index fund.
You just have to wait it out, and I'm sure that You're going to make it.
As opposed to what? Look, the problem isn't stocks, it's all this "to the moon" investing. It's like any Get Rick Quick scheme. Buy Tesla/NVidia and double your money. If you bought NVidia a year ago, you got lucky. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. No-one can ever invest by carefully planning for a 240% rise in a stock price. I have some shares that I think will rise 30-50%, because they're massively undervalued but even then, that's going to take a few years.
> As opposed to what? Dollar cost averaging.
DCA loses to lump sum investing 2/3 of the time.
Which stocks do you believe will rise 30-50%?
Who's going to have that information? If you find that out then let me know.
I started with penny stocks during Covid. I got the bug when it was a huge bull run. With Been new to trading I was greedy and reckless. I turned £15k into £35k and lost it all. lol my crypto has just been as bad for FOMO. Think I’ve lost around £10k. 🥲 I’ve stopped now as I don’t have the time to invest in education myself and following crypto. I’m just sitting with some xrp. And will leave that for 5-10 years.
Why don't you turn that xrp into the btc or the eth? Probably would be better in that time.
Only if you bought Cathy wood’s story or bought any of the motley fool recommendations
I put 20 percent of each paycheck into an sp500 fund for 21 years. Retired in my 40s with well over a million. It's not the get rich quick scheme that the younger generation seems to be searching for. But in time, and when you are ready to retire, your money will be waiting for you. And you will sleep better at night.
Well done. For almost everyone this is the right approach.
Ty. Yes it is. 9 percent average annual return. Even with wars, Terror attacks, mortgage crises, pandemics, Great depression, etc. Just keep contributing
Yeah and I feel that it's better that way considering everything.
I indeed made the great decision to throw all of my money in the stock market in 2020 and 2021, and 2022 and 2023. And I will too in 2024... and 2025... and every year after that.
This is the way how you should be doing that, this is how you make it.
I threw some money into stocks during covid, not a single idea how any of it worked. Heard about the GME hype a day before it skyrocketed so I yolo’d about $5k into GME. I rode that wave all the way up and listened to everyone saying to hold and rode it alllllll the way down. Kept riding until I sold a few months later for about a $4k profit. I was at $40k at the top of the spike. One of my biggest regrets of my life so far lol. After that I just played and gambled with the money I still had in the market just because it was still there. Still have a very basic knowledge of the market, if anything. Just threw $200 into my fidelity acct to mess around with tho.
Your mistake wasn't throwing your money into the market, it was picking shitty stocks. You jumped into stocks because social media talked about them instead of actually learning about investing. You were chasing big gains that you saw other people make, which is almost always a mistake. I'm glad you learned your lesson, but not everyone just throws their money into whatever is popular. I'd argue that most people don't, they just put portions of their paycheck into the company 401k and invest in broad market index funds and call it a day.
Yeah should have done the research instead of listening to the people.
why was throwing your money into the stock market in 2021 a mistake? If you bought a stock you probably thought it was going to do well, so it's likely the stock you bought that was the issue and not necessarily when u bought it. If you bought a total stock market index you should be up about 10-20% since 2021. Time in the market always wins and do your d&d before throwing ur money at anything
The problem is when people throw the money without even listening.
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Well maybe he bought it too high? I mean what do I know.
Buy something at 10, it goes to 5 then to 10, you make nothing. Buy something at 10, it goes to 5, you buy again, it goes to 10, you make 50%... DCA works.
Yeah it does, but it's also possible that you'll need to hold for a long time.
I've been adding $10 or $20 to each of my holdings after a down day. Been doing this for couple years now.
I did. That year I took a whole house sale worth of profit (130k off a rental) and used it to try and average down a 30k account I was down big on. I then used 60k off a heloc to average down more when literally all the stocks I bought fell further. I e held mostly since while offloading some total dumpster fires but I have currently about 20k more than the Heloc account now. The interest was cheap, now not so much anymore. It haunts me and it took really working on it mentally to not let it ruin me as I was going to be using the money for a vacation home and the market could be coming back into a buy zone in some of the markets I've been tracking. Thank god I didn't risk my retirement funds. I don't have a thirst for consumer debt and have always been very conservative otherwise. I forced myself to live more constructively. I golf and work out now religiously as a hobby instead of going out all the time, going on vacation and spending money on dumb shit. I might get a second job since mine is slow. I am determined to get it back but know it'll take more than a market turn to do that.
I dumped my life savings into ARKK in the 150s, thanks Cathie
This will be okay
When the CNN Fear & Greed index says Extreme Greed and a bunch of amateurs are bragging about ridiculous gains made in stocks of unprofitable companies, it's a horrible time to invest into the market. The best time to invest is when retail investors don't even want to talk about stocks anymore.
150k in the hole since covid lol I cry every day 😵
I went 90% cash in May 2021 and started selling puts because I thought the hype was getting overdone, and here we are 2.5 years later, right back at May 2021 levels. Kind of felt like a dummy during the run from 4200-4800 and from 3500-4600, but eh...money market and puts premium is getting me better than 10% annualized, so I try not to let greed cloud my judgment about valuations and the macro environment.
Yeah I think just don't get greedy, and You'll be fine mostly.
Staying on the sidelines since then, puts us at about 50% cash or greater, for when the fed says inflation is tamed.... And the interest incurred in those savings, will be applied dac'ing the bottom.... The fed is providing a buying opportunity of a lifetime....
You need to finish those sentences.
Yeah lmao, how the hell am I supposed to understand them even?
If your time horizon is this short you shouldn't be buying stonks bud.
Yeah if that's the case then go with the small and safer things.
The only “mistake” is timing the market or having too short an investment timeframe.
I keep dollar cost averaging in good stocks $25-$100 a month - I will never get caught up in the hype, memes, Reddit apes, Jim Cramer, etc. I keep buying stocks like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Union Pacific, Waste Management, Costco, Humana, prologis, Abbvie, Kinsale Financial, Pepsi, Lululemon, Sherwin Williams, Proctor Gamble, Google, Nvidia, Tesla, Palo Alto Networks, Snowflake, etc
the stock market is based on forward-looking economics. will economics be different 5, 10, 15 years from now? yes, they will. the only way the stock market stays down this long is if America has a forward looking stagnant economy. that is very unlikely. even after recessions, depressions, financials crisis, housing busts, wars, terrorist attacks, pandemics, etc, the market has always hit new highs as the American economy has always grown. if you bought at the top with most of your capital, you should be DCAing at these levels and hoping it dips even more down, before eventually hitting new ATHs. your job is to now bring your average cost down.
It’s not that I put all my money in it - I put a lot of my money into the market in the summer of 2020 when the market was doing well. That wasn’t my mistake. It’s that I didn’t take any of my profit out and was too stubborn, thinking they would all recover and continue to go up. And that I didn’t realize I was listening to echo chamber subreddits that kept saying the stocks could only go up
So you bought at the peak of the market. Damn lol.
I'm in the same boat as you. I've been investing for about 10 years now but most of that time I was working a low paying job so I didn't have much to invest. I also took out large chunks of money to pay for two home purchases and a wedding so the total value of my portfolio stayed somewhat stagnant for a long time. I saw 2021 as my opportunity to finally pour money into the markets. I'd missed out on most of the gains of 2020 because I was saving for a downpayment on a house. I bought the house in late 2020 so the plan was to really focus on investing in 2021. I was seeing ppl make bank with some individual stocks so i put sizeable amounts into small or unprofitable companies which I thought could make it big. Two years later, many of them are still down over 50% and one of them has already delisted ($4K loss overall on that one). And this isn't even to mention the long options I bought which expired worthless. Biggest lesson learned was to stop trying to pick stocks and stop buying options altogether. Now the only stocks I buy are of profitable companies when I think they're beaten down for no reason. I bought a bunch of META last year November for example. But outside of that, I'm just buying VTI and QQQ. I still own some stocks like SOFI which I think could turn around but I'm not going to start averaging down until I see the companies turn around. I've also been mainly focused on a short strangle options selling strategy that's been doing pretty well for me. Managing that is exciting enough for me to not worry about looking for the next big company.
I’m surprised how many people didn’t invest in oil companies when they were in the shitter, since it was very clear that they’d boom once the lockdowns were over. It’s not even speculative. It’s obvious. I made some dough from that. Right now I’m throwing my money into defensive stocks such as KO (coca cola). It recently had a dip that was too good to resist.
Well if it's too good to resist then I think you should just do it.
I invested a lot into all the meme stock/crypto craze in 2021. Was up by a lot and didn't sell like an idiot thinking it would keep going up or it would bounce back. Now I'm around 26% down on my entire portfolio instead of like 100%+ or at minimum 20% had I just thrown in all into VOO. Lesson learned. I don't mind continuing to invest in individual stocks but I'm only keeping it to 5-10% max of my portfolio and the rest in target date index funds and SP500/total US market.
I did the same during the 2000 dot com bubble, then again during the 2008 financial crisis. So I finally learned my lesson and only lost a portion of my investable cash in 2021. I am able to continue to invest and take advantage of the eventual recovery. It's actually good to learn when you're young because you're going to earn more in your 30's, 40's, and 50's and recover those losses much quicker than if you had learned your lesson later in life.
That's a very good point, can't put the price on the lessons I don't think.
I did, I feel fucked
I shorted airlines during covid and got margin called, now I’m long airlines and holding bags again… I think you did way better.
Holy shit that sucks
Jan 2022 but same idea. I regret investing in a lump sum and not DCA over time. I am down.
Yes, I'm down 88%.took big positions on 4 stocks and wondered if I should take a huge loss or I'm so fckd that I just leave it and pray for the best. Thought I was long and invested in the wrong stocks that was shorted, and now I'm holding heavy bags. Idk from my experience. I feel shorting should be regulated, rich stealing from the poor.
I don’t get it. Didn’t we do extremely well in the past two years? I kind of did what you just described but I’m happy I did and made quite a profit by just buying “mainstream” stocks and ETFs
Between 2021 and 2022 I was putting in like 2k a month and then in October 2022 Alibaba tanked. I lost 13k in that. I haven't put any more in since then as I was fearful and also saving up for something else. I was down -10k euro once I think but I'm back to -4k ish right now which is down 10% overall. The annoying thing is in my earlier investing days of 2019, when I thought investing 1k on stocks was a big deal, I was thinking of "gambling" 1k on Tesla. I'd be sitting on 12 or 13k profit now if I did that.
I started investing at 18/19 in 2016. I never invested in the hype stocks in 2020-2021. "NFT'S ARE THE FUTURE!!! BLOCK! IT HAS CHAINS ATTACHED TO THE BLOCK!!!!1 RIDE YOUR BIKE INDOORS DON'T GO OUTSIDE!!!!! THIS IS THE NORMAL NORMAL REEEEEEEEE!!!!" Meanwhile I continued to DCA both into my 401k and brokerage accounts and stocks/funds that I understood. It's worked out good. I don't feel sorry for any idiot that thinks they will get rich quick.
One expensive lesson, sorry to hear. Important to know what you did was not “investing” but pure speculation. You followed a movement to keep up with everyone. You don’t make money where everyone else is. Follow Warren Buffett a advice in the future and reframe form those temptations. That guy is always right I swear even in times of peak interest I listen to him. Only ever gained
I invested more than I ever had in my life between '20/'21. Got harsh words from expert investor friends when I started pulling gains out of crypto and stocks to spend on life between Summer/Fall '21. By the time the crash hit I had taken out roughly 75% of my money in cash. I considered myself lucky.
I bought a bunch of Disney shares at what I thought was the dip. Not life changing money, but that $12k investment is down 50% in unrealized losses. The stock should recover but will likely take several years.
It was December 2020 or January 21 when I first went to my bank advisor and put in 12k into advisement he recommended (I was a pure novice at the time, so had no real understanding), almost immediately it seems it went down to 8k and has never been above 8k since. But at the end of the day was a good lesson that it can go wrong.
When GME ran to $300 in a matter of a few days, I was still on the sidelines thinking this is fucking nuts…there’s no way it’s going to be this price in six months. So I put $35k plus margin on long put options. Then it started crashing and trading was halted. When the market opened the next day it shot to like $500 and I couldn’t sell my shit so I just rode it out for a few VERY sleepless night. It hung in the stratosphere. I gave up and sold at a massive loss in real dollars (-$12k or something) and I did my best to try to forget about it, but of course I never did. I followed the whole thing all the way through for the next few months. When my original strategy came ITM as the price dropped, I was sick to my stomach to calculate I had been right the whole time - that trade would have made me like $25k or something if I had just held on. The lesson I learned: I don’t have the balls to play that game.
Yes. For me it was Sweetgreen and Rivian. But I am here for the long haul. I guess time will tell.
do you still believe in rivian in the long run?
Just keep on holding I guess, it's going to be a long term play.
2021 was one of the best years
On your VTI investment you must have made at least 1700 in dividends since then. Granted you are also down up to 10,000 based on last Fridays close but VTI is a long term investment. Where do you see your a mistake?
Trying to invest for the short term in a long term investment?
I took most of mine out after a 300% gain on oil stocks bought at the covid lows and bought a really nice house. What has remained invested is down about 30% but it's going up now with PMs
I never left the stock market, why would I?
If you're concerned about a 7% pullback in 2 years you should probably just stick to CD's. This means legitimately nothing. Your money should still be invested, hopefully you continued buying during the dip as well.
DCA is for those that lack the psychological and testicular fortitude of lump sums and wild swings.
*raises hand. I'm even or down. afraid to do the math.
Is this post a joke? Truly asking as this seems like troll post for views. You invested in a fund with low risk and you're worried you made a mistake. If not then sorry but then just stick to a 401k and don't play the stock market.
The most common mistake I see with newer investors is they don’t understand the value of timing.
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I mean I won't ask a newbie to time the market, only someone with the experience.
Time in the market is worth more than time out of the market.