A friend of mine worked too hard, his wife got fed up and divorced him. It was horrible, he had to sell of his Sun stock so that he his wife could have half. That was in the late 1990s. He has really mixed feelings about it.
I sold some of the stock I had gotten as part of the employee stock purchase plan to buy a brand new car for cash. It was the first time in my life I didn't have a car payment every month. That was in January of 1995. When I sold that car in 1999 to a used car dealer he asked what I paid for it, I told him $1.6M. That was what the stock would have been worth had I held it until 1999. Then I used the stock in a company that had acquired my startup to buy a replacement car, again for cash. When I sold that car in 2009 the equivalent value for the stock was just $280. A bargain!
The dot com days taught me the hard way why you diversify. Sure you don't get the big returns like the ones you hear about where a person invested it all in one stock that went through the roof. But you also don't lose it all when the stock goes down either.
All things in moderation, and now when I have more money in a stock than I'd like to lose I sell half and put the proceeds into something unrelated to the stock I sold.
I think I bought it at $60/share and it went down to $3 after dot com bust, wiping out Roth IRA. Oh well, that was years ago in my 20's and I'm diversified so really just a lesson (not to buy tech stocks).
Sure, but on average, everything is doing well since the last economic crises. There are dot-com tech stocks that never recovered. I'll only buy funds or dividend paying stocks, though mostly everything is in a 401k (which rode out the crashes quite well).
I sold some of the stock I had gotten as part of the employee stock purchase plan to buy a brand new car for cash. It was the first time in my life I didn't have a car payment every month. That was in January of 1995. When I sold that car in 1999 to a used car dealer he asked what I paid for it, I told him $1.6M. That was what the stock would have been worth had I held it until 1999. Then I used the stock in a company that had acquired my startup to buy a replacement car, again for cash. When I sold that car in 2009 the equivalent value for the stock was just $280. A bargain!
The dot com days taught me the hard way why you diversify. Sure you don't get the big returns like the ones you hear about where a person invested it all in one stock that went through the roof. But you also don't lose it all when the stock goes down either.
All things in moderation, and now when I have more money in a stock than I'd like to lose I sell half and put the proceeds into something unrelated to the stock I sold.