I pulled most of my money out of the market earlier this year -pretty much all cash since around February or March (I don’t remember for certain). There’s a little bit in mutual funds and then I’ve done a little bit of dabbling… but mostly all cash. Part of me was kicking myself for having flatlined my account … and part of me kept thinking that there was a crash of some sort waiting to happen. I had enough in the market to lose something over the past month, but it’s well under a 1% reduction of what I had before.
Looks like someone with about as much investing skills as me, but with a lot more guts: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/help-my-short-position-got-crushed-and-now-i-owe-e-trade-10644556-2015-11-19?siteid=yhoof2
“His name is Joe Campbell, and he claims he went to bed Wednesday evening with some $37,000 in his trading account at E-Trade. One notable development on the pharma front later, and Campbell woke up to a debt of $106,445.56. Now, he may end up liquidating his 401(k). And his wife’s.”
Apparently he ended up raising more than 5 grand in donations. Go figure…
Dude shorted a biotech?! What an idiot. The downside of a long trade is your basis. The downside of a short trade… so help me god. He has 3 days to come up with the cash. Good luck.
Not only did he short a biotech, but he shorted a $2 stock! I have never shorted an individual stock in my personal account.
Since you revived this thread, I am in the process of restructuring my portfolio, and not doing a great job. One of the (many) classic mistakes I make is I “fall in love” with positions, so I have some great stocks but a lot of garbage too. I counted 45 positions in my IRA, maybe 25 of them individual stocks. Totally ridiculous. Since I haven’t been outperforming the indices I decided to sell everything and buy 2 or 3 ETFs while reducing my total equity exposure. I have liquidated 10 positions so far, including an overweight in MCD which I sold at an average price of 104 (closed 113.75 Friday) I have been doing this way too slowly, but that’s what I am trying to do now. When I get it down to those 3 ETFs and some bonds I hope to spend a lot less time watching and worrying about the market. It will be my own version of the lazy man’s portfolio. I will still own some individual bonds - rates are so low it seems stupid to pay even minimal fees for a bond etf - and 3 equity ETFs. Out of V on Friday (Sold calls that were exercised)
I never short or buy on margin. We are very risk adverse and prefer to gain (and lose) slowly but surely. We mostly live below our means as our way of sleeping well at night. The Monte Carlo simulations suggest we have a huge likelihood of leaving a nice estate when we die.
Mine is much worse - holding positions that I’m not even in love with. It’s something like “if I sell something below its all time high then I’ve lost, and if it’s below the cost basis, that borders on criminal”. Irrational, but a fact of life.
And this is despite me having an Enron employee like experience, but decades earlier and stretched out over several years, with the stock of the company I worked in, which happened to be the bulk of my portfolio. I tried some “therapy” through things like a target date fund where I am not pulling the trigger, and all it did was it turned me off target funds.
I know!! It could be that LinkedIn earnings precipitated the great Dot com bust 2.0… Holy JP Morgan. A sure sign that LinkedIn was about to implode - when your network starts posting cat memes that circulated on the web two years ago… watch out!
Uber etc. are not going anywhere, but the mood at the headquarters is going to be less cheerful. Maybe some crumbs will be finally invested into businesses that actually develop something tangible, like lifesaving medicines? Oh, wait. We don’t need new treatments for old diseases. Pharma is greedy. Let’s buy medicines in China. They are old, but they are much cheaper out there. /sarcasm.
I am not worried for my son yet. His startup is very profitable, and is even turning down investment capital. However, I guess you never know for sure.
Hang in there, dstark. I worked for a startup that was about to go public when Al Gore said that the human genome had been sequenced, and that was the end of biotech. Biotech tanked! “Tanked” was actually an understatement. I went to work for another co barely escaping the demise of the first company. That was a good gig which lasted until the twin towers fell in NYC… Somehow, you pick up the pieces, regroup, and move forward. Mr. jokes that some day I will write a book that MBA programs will use in their startup strategy curriculums - how NOT to run a startup.
Mr. fed me when I was unemployed, and I fed him when he was out of work. Your daughter has her husband, and her hubby has her. They both have you, too. Ohana. I love this word.
(The mood at work was rather normal. Asked Mr. - his bosses think the sky is not falling. People will get sick… so what the biotech index is down 1/3! Yikes.)
