two big mistakes

What was your biggest investment mistake?

Ray Badger, I have been an investor in the stock market since 1972 with a great return.
Written Jan 4

I have had two.

In the 1990’s I bought 100 shares of Apple stock for $ 12.00 a share. About two months later it had gone up to $ 20.00 a share. I told a friend that since they were pretty much a niche computer manufacturer with some following in schools and graphic artists that I was going to sell it the next day. About 30 minutes after I sold he called me and was saying loudly, “DON’T SELL APPLE” Steve Jobs had just announced he was coming back to Apple. I did think about buying it back but just had a hard time buying back a stock at $ 30.00 that I had just sold for $ 20.00.

I still have some of the stocks I bought back then and probably would have held Apple. I sat down a while back and looked up the history of splits and calculated what those shares of stock would be worth if I had held them. The number I came up with was $ 670,000.00

The second mistake was at the depths of the dot com bust. I had around a $ 1,000.00 to invest. I debated between two courses of action. One was to buy a bunch of stocks that had crashed and were at one time high flyers who were selling for about a buck a share. I thought if I bought stock in 10 companies there was a good chance one would turn around.

My second thing I considered was there was a stock in an online book seller that I really liked. I found them to be a great company and the stock was selling for $ 10.00 a share so I debated between 1000 shared divided up in 10 companies and 100 shares in one company and went with the 10 companies. Of course the online book seller was Amazon. I about broke even on the stocks in the 10 companies.