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The wealth-building thread

Chromatischism

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That would be one hell of a pay day.

I was talked out of buying TSLA in early 2020 by my financial advisor. I knew about the upcoming Model 3 and had a pretty strong feeling about what it would mean for the stock.

Needless to say, I don't go to that advisor anymore. Missed out on at least a 7x.
 

MRC01

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This year sucks, with equities down about 20% from the peak. But they were up strongly well above the 8% CAGR average, for the years prior. So this year is bad, but the 3 year running is close to par for the long-term course.
I don't see this as a time to sell. That time passed months ago. If you missed that boat (like I did), then you might as well hold for now. Realistically speaking, selling would have incurred a 24% hit in long term cap gains anyway. So even if one sold months ago at the peak, after paying the tax-man you might as well have held.
 

Suffolkhifinut

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What's everyone's mood like as of early October, 2022?

Me: Ugh, no great joy at seeing what I've "lost" (unrealized!) this year. But I'm still a lot better off today than I was at the start of 2020, when I suddenly had time on my hands and tidied-up my investments.

Ever wondered about how you would have made out if you hadn't sold a certain stock? Me neither. But yesterday I got curious about the nVidia Corp stock I owned in the late 1990s! This was in the midst of the tech boom / IPO-mania years. My token participation in the madness was to put 1000 USD into NVDA, simply because I liked nVidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). For awhile, not much happened, then the stock became part of the NASDAQ composite index, and within 18 months, value had soared 10x, and I was nervous, so I cashed out. Not too shabby, right? (cough) Turns out that over the years, stock splits would have increased my shares 48-fold from 3,000 to 144,000, and had I cashed out by early November, 2021, I might have brought in more than 40M USD, plus dividends reinvested - whew! But of course from my perspective in the early 2000s, this was unknowable, and much of the soaring value in recent years was tied to the rise of cryptocurrencies - nVidia's GPUs were the de facto standard for Bitcoin mining. But at the moment, the trend in crypto is away from Proof-of-Work, else crypto market values make crypto mining uneconomical, and suddenly, GPUs are no longer such a hot commodity, and in the span of just under 1 year, I might have seen my $40M fall by 50%.

Still, I gotta wonder how my life would have changed by having an extra 10, 20 or $40M tacked onto my net worth, and whether coming into serious money a lot earlier in life might've made me insufferable :facepalm:
The moods OK even when sitting on 400,000 worthless shares in an INVESCO property bond. Only invest what you can afford too lose. We aren’t really well off, have a nice small house, car and can afford to eat well and keep the house fairly warm. The majority of people in the World are far worse off then us.
 

fpitas

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No point in working too hard here, the pinkos and/or politicians will take it away via a dazzling amount of taxes, direct or indirect. Anyway, am I the only one completely disgusted with the concept of "finance" aka playing around with money? Even if this can be a great boon, as your post explain, I just don't want to have anything to do with it; nor the worry I'm sure it'd bring me.
Scrooge.jpeg


Dunno. Playing with money doesn't have to be a big worry
 

Chromatischism

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This year sucks, with equities down about 20% from the peak. But they were up strongly well above the 8% CAGR average, for the years prior. So this year is bad, but the 3 year running is close to par for the long-term course.
I don't see this as a time to sell. That time passed months ago. If you missed that boat (like I did), then you might as well hold for now. Realistically speaking, selling would have incurred a 24% hit in long term cap gains anyway. So even if one sold months ago at the peak, after paying the tax-man you might as well have held.
Of course that depends what your holdings were. The index is down over 20%, but many stocks are down 30, 40, 50%. And the tax is a % on your gain as income, not on the total value of the holding, so you could be paying 24% on $5k or 37% on $500k.
 
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Suffolkhifinut

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No point in working too hard here, the pinkos and/or politicians will take it away via a dazzling amount of taxes, direct or indirect. Anyway, am I the only one completely disgusted with the concept of "finance" aka playing around with money? Even if this can be a great boon, as your post explain, I just don't want to have anything to do with it; nor the worry I'm sure it'd bring me.
Never understood how the French economy manages to keep its head above water. Their level of social spending is astronomical even with their Dick Turpin attitude to taxation. Years ago working in Tripoli Libya for two years our neighbours worked for Air France. One of the wives worked for the electrical supply industry in France. She was in her late thirties and had taken an agreed two year leave of absence. Said on their return home she would return to work for two years to complete twenty years of service and then retire on a full pension.
 

Marc v E

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What's everyone's mood like as of early October, 2022?

Me: Ugh, no great joy at seeing what I've "lost" (unrealized!) this year. But I'm still a lot better off today than I was at the start of 2020, when I suddenly had time on my hands and tidied-up my investments.

Ever wondered about how you would have made out if you hadn't sold a certain stock? Me neither. But yesterday I got curious about the nVidia Corp stock I owned in the late 1990s! This was in the midst of the tech boom / IPO-mania years. My token participation in the madness was to put 1000 USD into NVDA, simply because I liked nVidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). For awhile, not much happened, then the stock became part of the NASDAQ composite index, and within 18 months, value had soared 10x, and I was nervous, so I cashed out. Not too shabby, right? (cough) Turns out that over the years, stock splits would have increased my shares 48-fold from 3,000 to 144,000, and had I cashed out by early November, 2021, I might have brought in more than 40M USD, plus dividends reinvested - whew! But of course from my perspective in the early 2000s, this was unknowable, and much of the soaring value in recent years was tied to the rise of cryptocurrencies - nVidia's GPUs were the de facto standard for Bitcoin mining. But at the moment, the trend in crypto is away from Proof-of-Work, else crypto market values make crypto mining uneconomical, and suddenly, GPUs are no longer such a hot commodity, and in the span of just under 1 year, I might have seen my $40M fall by 50%.

Still, I gotta wonder how my life would have changed by having an extra 10, 20 or $40M tacked onto my net worth, and whether coming into serious money a lot earlier in life might've made me insufferable :facepalm:
This story confirms my experience that the best investment strategy is to buy early after ipo and hold for a long time, say 10 years.
 

Descartes

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What's everyone's mood like as of early October, 2022?

Me: Ugh, no great joy at seeing what I've "lost" (unrealized!) this year. But I'm still a lot better off today than I was at the start of 2020, when I suddenly had time on my hands and tidied-up my investments.

Ever wondered about how you would have made out if you hadn't sold a certain stock? Me neither. But yesterday I got curious about the nVidia Corp stock I owned in the late 1990s! This was in the midst of the tech boom / IPO-mania years. My token participation in the madness was to put 1000 USD into NVDA, simply because I liked nVidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). For awhile, not much happened, then the stock became part of the NASDAQ composite index, and within 18 months, value had soared 10x, and I was nervous, so I cashed out. Not too shabby, right? (cough) Turns out that over the years, stock splits would have increased my shares 48-fold from 3,000 to 144,000, and had I cashed out by early November, 2021, I might have brought in more than 40M USD, plus dividends reinvested - whew! But of course from my perspective in the early 2000s, this was unknowable, and much of the soaring value in recent years was tied to the rise of cryptocurrencies - nVidia's GPUs were the de facto standard for Bitcoin mining. But at the moment, the trend in crypto is away from Proof-of-Work, else crypto market values make crypto mining uneconomical, and suddenly, GPUs are no longer such a hot commodity, and in the span of just under 1 year, I might have seen my $40M fall by 50%.

Still, I gotta wonder how my life would have changed by having an extra 10, 20 or $40M tacked onto my net worth, and whether coming into serious money a lot earlier in life might've made me insufferable :facepalm:
Did a similar thing with Apple when it was at $1 a share! Sold it at $10. If only I had held on to it and sold last year with all the split I would have a cool $60million.
Instead I am still working!
 

MRC01

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This story confirms my experience that the best investment strategy is to buy early after ipo and hold for a long time, say 10 years.
I used to think the same and discovered the hard way that every strategy, no matter how good, has counterexamples. In 2000, we sold our company for $3.2 B and then watched those who bought it slowly destroy it and go out of business over the next 3 years. However soon we sold, it wasn't soon enough.
 

fpitas

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My advice is spending less than you make, mary a rich girl and pick your parents carefully, LOL.
I had a chance at a rich girl with enormous uhm, assets. Sometimes I kick myself.
 
OP
JeffS7444

JeffS7444

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One change I'd make: For airline flights 5+ hours in duration, it'd be first class for me!
Did a similar thing with Apple when it was at $1 a share! Sold it at $10. If only I had held on to it and sold last year with all the split I would have a cool $60million.
Instead I am still working!
I remember how, in the late 1990s, my boss kept reminding me "Apple stock is $13; are you going to buy some?". But no way anyone could have known that by 2022, Apple would be a leading supplier of devices which people can't seem to live without.
 

fpitas

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One change I'd make: For airline flights 5+ hours in duration, it'd be first class for me!
Right? It goes against my essential cheapness...but yeah.
 
OP
JeffS7444

JeffS7444

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Wish I understood the concept of "Hedging" back in the 1990s! So instead of selling my entire stake in NVDA, perhaps I could have just cashed out my original $1000, and treated the remaining $9000 as free money and kept it invested in NVDA.

But when reviewing NVDA historical stock performance, it sure looks like recent enormous gains (and losses) were directly tied to cryptocurrency mining:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/stock-price-history
And had I sold by late 2015 instead of late 2021, I'd have missed a 4:1 stock split, and my take would have been a far more modest ~250K USD.

Still, $250K in 2015 from a $1000 investment made 15 years prior wouldn't have been too shabby!
 

blueone

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Wish I understood the concept of "Hedging" back in the 1990s! So instead of selling my entire stake in NVDA, perhaps I could have just cashed out my original $1000, and treated the remaining $9000 as free money and kept it invested in NVDA.

But when reviewing NVDA historical stock performance, it sure looks like recent enormous gains (and losses) were directly tied to cryptocurrency mining:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/stock-price-history
And had I sold by late 2015 instead of late 2021, I'd have missed a 4:1 stock split, and my take would have been a far more modest ~250K USD.

Still, $250K in 2015 from a $1000 investment made 15 years prior wouldn't have been too shabby!
Since crypto mining is a shrinking GPU business, and the client GPU business has a lot of competition (though Nvidia still dominates the high end, at least for now), Nvidia is becoming more and more of a supercomputing company. The problem with supercomputing is that it isn't granular enough, meaning most of the business is dependent on relatively few huge supercomputers. This means Nvidia's business is going to become more uneven over time, which the stock market dislikes. Name a supercomputer company with a stock the market likes. Yup, you can't.

(Crypto mining is a declining GPU business for two reasons. One, GPUs are good, but custom mining ASICs are far more power efficient, and they're not as difficult to design as general purpose GPUs. Second, the emergence of Proof of Stake processing as opposed to Proof of Work for crypto mining dramatically reduces the computing power necessary. Etherium has already made the leap, and I think political pressures will push Bitcoin and others in that direction. The outlook for crypto mining on GPUs is dim, IMO.)

 
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