Tell us a true but wonderful story about making lots of money in a stock or set of investments (bonds, IRA)
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Now that we are looking into a new year of making money, it would be nice to have people tell us true stories of their success in the stock market.
Tell us about a time where you got a stock pick or did some great research and picked out a stock or a general investment that did great. You bought low and sold very- very high.
(I see stocks all the time that started at under $10 and now are in the hundreds. If you bought them at $10 and invested enough money and sold when it went up 10 fold plus, you could be retired by now.)
I will start: I bought Priceline (PCLN) at about $100 a share and sold it at near $500, thinking it would never go higher. Now it is at $1140 a share!
Back in 2008 when things took a tank, being the young novice at investing, i started to double my contribution to my 401k fund. Here we are years later and my 401k is easily worth 20% more than it would have been if i did not take that risk. Very happy about that
Back in 2008 when things took a tank, being the young novice at investing, i started to double my contribution to my 401k fund. Here we are years later and my 401k is easily worth 20% more than it would have been if i did not take that risk. Very happy about that
Yes, this! I want to hear about people who stayed in the market, didn't try to time it, and then years later retired happily ever after!
Now that we are looking into a new year of making money, it would be nice to have people tell us true stories of their success in the stock market.
Tell us about a time where you got a stock pick or did some great research and picked out a stock or a general investment that did great. You bought low and sold very- very high.
(I see stocks all the time that started at under $10 and now are in the hundreds. If you bought them at $10 and invested enough money and sold when it went up 10 fold plus, you could be retired by now.)
I will start: I bought Priceline (PCLN) at about $100 a share and sold it at near $500, thinking it would never go higher. Now it is at $1140 a share!
Others will think this is boring, but my deferred compensation plan returned just under 11% this year in a mix of funds, 75% stocks and 25% bonds. I think that's pretty wonderful.
an opportunity presented itself about 12 years ago to buy out some partners in a real estate holding company at a what turned out to be a price that was so undervalued it was insane in retrospect.
having sold my house and renting gave me part of the cash to buy iin since it was not tied up in the house anymore and i couldn't afford to make equity loan payments with an open ended venture not knowing when the ship would come in.
i had to borrow the rest of the money and it was quite nerve wracking with lots of lost sleep trying to decide whether this was the right thing to do.
it turned out to be an amazing venture as we owned prestigious co-op apartments over looking central park with rent stabilized tenants paying break even rent.
the other partners got tired of waiting for the tenants to move so they could sell the apartments . they just wanted out and to move on.
well i figured some of the tenants were just about ripe for retirement and with no pay checks it would be so expensive to live there that a 100k offer to buy out the leases would pay off in a short period of time.
it worked , and 3 apartments were sold my first year paying off all the loans . we held 9 apartments and over the last 12 years we sold 7 out of the 9 yielding millions for 4 of us to split .
but it got better because one of our partners was bernard spitzer the real estate king here in nyc.
in a side venture the 4 of us also held a 10% stake in commercial lease rights on the commercial spaces in the building with bernard spitzer holding 90% . we didn't own the property ,the co-op did but we retained the rights to keep the rents for a specified number of years .
in march an investor group bought those lease rights from us for 18 million doillars.
there were 20 years left on the lease rights before they expired worthless and the co-op goes back to collecting the rent.
it was quite a landmark deal even here in nyc. in fact we were not even aware the deal went through as only a 10% partner we had no say in it so i wasn't aware until i read it on the internet in an article.
it really turned into a life changing venture that is for sure. my 500k investment brought us personally in about 6 million dollars pretax in 12 years.
i would be lying if i didn't say luck and being in the right place at the right time didn't play a big part.
Last edited by mathjak107; 01-01-2015 at 03:30 AM..
Back in the late 70's my wife was working at a small local bank. Each year the bank would give their employees 10 shares of bank stock as an annual bonus. Eventually the bank grew large enough to be bought out by a larger bank. We redeemed the bank shares that were received as a bonus, and the proceeds we used to buy Apple stock. We had enough from the bank stock redemption to purchase 125 shares of Apple. A few years went by and the Apple stock split. It still wasn't worth a whole lot, but now Steve Jobs was back in control of Apple. We all know what Apple has done since then.
as long as it is a stock that goes up ha ha ha . the investment graveyard is full stocks that looked like they should have been a of buy and hold only they failed or performed poorly ala gm..
as long as it is a stock that goes up ha ha ha . the investment graveyard is full stocks that looked like they should have been a of buy and hold only they failed or performed poorly ala gm..
but if it isn't going up don't buy it right? lol
Jak,
The OP asked for success stories. Most of us could probably write a book on those ventures that weren't as successful.
Back in 2009 I started buying Gannett when it broke $3 on the downside. Kept buying it on down toward the $2 area; wound up with 5000 shares. Started selling it a year later at $15 and got out of the last at $17
In the late 1990s I was a graduate student in California, studying engineering, but in a classical and poorly-monetized subfield. But I had colleagues in electrical engineering, biomedical and the like. Frequently I'd hear stock tips about start-ups with remarkably enticing stories. My colleagues encountered the subject companies as part of their dissertation-research. These weren't dot-coms. An example was OSTX - a company that I little-understood, but which had something to do with a diagnostic test for osteoporosis, done in a doctor's office. My mode of operation was to "invest" maybe $3000 without doing any research or confirmation of what the company does; remember, this was the 1990s. I bought OSTX on a Monday or a Tuesday. By Thursday afternoon it doubled. The next day I sold it. If memory serves, it then proceeded to tank. Not exactly a life-altering gain, but 100% in 3 days was an enormous ego-booster.
I also bought Worldcom, Lucent and Global Crossings. That triumvirate turned me into an aficionado of index funds.
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