Personally I find it really fun. Helps keep chasing money in perspective.
Could have, should have, would have.
Company I was working for didn't go public until the end of March that year. No horror stories from me, was a fun time to be working, lots of great memories.
Investing in a market index today is even easier. Instead of doing historical research on thousands of stocks, you just compare the expense ratios of a handful of index funds and pick the lowest one.
I don't disagree but even modest bets in specific companies have done pretty well over the past couple decades or so. Yes, they're gambles but small-ish bets for bigger payoffs than NASDAQ. (Though that's been pretty good overall and probably safer in aggregate.)
It’s hard to know few decades ago which companies to put substantial money in. It’s hard to know which companies will perform in the next few decades. And if you are wrong in your bets, there goes a few decades of your life and you can’t rewind the clock to try again.
If you’re retirement investing there’s there’s no need to make substantial bets in individual companies. 90% in index funds will get you to a reasonable retirement, 10% in something that looks interesting has minimal downside and significant upside because the value of money is non linear.
Assuming a buy and hold strategy at worst all your bet goes to zero which is unlikely, but there’s many companies that go to 100+X and hitting them can meaningfully boost your retirement. Gateway computers vs Dell wasn’t an obvious choice, but that’s a coin flip with huge upsides. Buy it in a given year and ignore it for the next 20, no you’re not going to time the market but you would see most of the upside.
I wouldn't fault anyone for just not doing individual investing. But, yep, if you're interested in putting in some time and think you have some insight into a particular sector, putting 10% or whatever into some individual companies you think are particularly interesting isn't a bad strategy. Some will flame out but maybe you'll hit one or two gems. It can also make sense to clean house now and then. I did that a couple years ago and I'm glad I did.
- mainstream investment (passive or active via trusted professionals and with balanced approach); and —
- making non bank-breaking direct stock investments in some really promising early stage public companies (again, with professional help)
Without the latter the return would be just that — earning a return; it won’t even come close to wealth or have a possibility of that.
PS. Yes, those professional help won’t have a crystal ball, but they can tell you from an average company to good to just okay to absolute shit via things like their books, governance, returns, plans etc.
Yeah. AAPL could have been a huge win for anyone. I actually did pretty well but nothing like the step level function that investing a bit earlier or bigger could have been. And there was also a bit of a drop when a lot of people could have doubled down but got out. But there's a lot of luck involved. (And I've since diversified most of it to money managers and taken the tax benefits.)
In the case of APPL it is fun to think about what the money I spent on a computer that year like a Power Mac G4 could have been worth today if I had invested in the stock instead.
I remember local developer group chats about BTC / ETH in early 2010s. We met weekly next to local restaurant bar. I like to calculate what if I had skipped a meal or a drink one night and instead bought BTC or ETH with the that money what it would be worth today.
I tried to buy 20,000 BTC in 2010 for $20. But this predates exchanges and sellers wouldn't take paypal (because reversals), so you had to use sketchy online pay services. Too much effort/risk.
You know what the reality is though? As soon as those coins were worth $500, $1000, definitely by $5000, I would have sold them all. Really any sane person would have.
When bitcoin was really cheap, purchasing was sketchy. And, as you say, any sane person would have dumped--and hopefully not been ripped off--as soon as the price climbed to a material level. It's not like you could just log onto your Fidelity account and buy and sell bitcoin. I know someone that, as I recall, their initial bitcoin purchase was almost like an in-person drug deal sort of thing.
Some AAPL bets were pretty good ones. BTC seems more like a real gamble. Though obviously back in self-mining days even if it seems not much different from SETI at Home. And your hard disk would probably have crashed at some point. Or you would probably have been ripped off.
Money you almost made hurts equally as much as money you had and then lost. (That's Munger. In my opinion big money you almost made hurts more than big money lost.)
Apple wasn't doing so great in 2000. Its "PC" market share was ~2%. Jobs had just come back a few years earlier and MS made a large investment, but neither the iPod nor OS X had come out yet, so it was quite a turnaround story.
In the earlyish 2000s, Apple started to look interesting as a consumer electronics company even if it wasn't clear they were committed to it. And the whole mobile trend wasn't obvious to a lot of us at that point.
I talked to them as an analyst in that era and they were still spending attention on enterprisey products like Xserve.
And even the initial iPhone in 2007 wasn't clearly a game-changer. It was the 3GS that really made a lot of people take notice.
