Jump to content

Recommended Posts

Posted

Hindsight is 20/20.

Everyone has situations where they missed out on something massive (cue teenager emoting at the word "massive") for whatever reason.

  • Maybe you sold all your nVidia in 2018
  • Maybe you had a chance to invest in a company that you thought was stupid that later would have made you wealthy and retired
  • Maybe you sold NFLX after the Qwikster debacle

For me, it's very topical and upsetting. In late 2020 I turned down an offer to join a little known (at the time, to mainstream America at least) big data, software and services company called Palantir. 

The company at the time had a market cap of $40bn @ $20 a share and I had an offer with some meaningful equity.

I thought their compensation package was low (and it was, compared to the spiking covid market we will all remember) and I thought they were too much a Fed & Academic / R&D play (they weren't, though it looked a lot like that at the time).

5 years later, will be a $400bn valuation @ $156 a share. 

Millions of dollars never realized because I was "smart". 

Funny because on a long enough timeline, "smart" and "coward with no vision" are almost the same thing.

 

Posted

thread probably should be titled something like, "biggest investment miss" 

anyway

Biggest I have been directly associated with is I strongly advocated for my brother to take the approximately 5x return on the 25K worth of Gamestop he bought in 2020.  If he would have held another few months it COULD have been worth over something like 1.5 million. Assuming he was intrepid enough to sell at the absolute peak.

Its a tough one for sure.  He doesn't give me too much grief...LOL.

Posted

Thinking if I did things the hard way, someone would notice the ingenuity, persistence, and effort.

13 year lesson.  I did alright, but gotdam it could have been easier and better.

Posted

personally, the 150 grand extra or so that I could have gotten out of a house I sold at the start of COVID would be nice to have.  Joke of it is I held on to it vacant for 6 months to avoid short term cap gains and I was in full panic mode to get it sold in early 2020 thinking a global pandemic would crush housing prices...WHOOPS..great call nostradamus

Posted

Back during the GFC there was an auto parts company that was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy (weren't they all?) but received a capital infusion that apparently the entire market didn't know about.  I was screening stocks for low P/B valuations and it was one that popped up.  The stock was trading around $0.10 per share and had $5 per share of cash on the balance sheet and no debt.  Stupid stock would bounce between $0.10 and $0.20 every month and a half or so.

I played the yo-yo several times with a small amount of money.  Then one time when it got down to $0.10 I figured I would take all my prior "winnings" and go all-in.  Next pop instead of $0.20 was up to $0.50.  Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth I smartly cashed out everything.  In all I had something like $25K in this stock on an initial investment of $1K the first time I played it.  Fucking Warren Buffet ain't got shit on me.

A year later, same stock was $28 per share.  

Posted

Before the birth of our first when she decided to be a SAHM, my wife worked for a startup.  They were fledgling.  She had been there 4 years and had some decent stock options.  But, they weren't vested, so she would have had to scratch a check to the tune of about $20K to get the stock.  Simultaneously, a good friend that was a stock broker at the time had the inside scoop on a pre-IPO for a company called Spare Backup.  This was right on the cusp of cloud storage being a real thing, so it seemed like a no-brainer.  My wife and I decided that her stock probably wouldn't be worth the paper it was written on given the perceived direction of the company.  So, we bought $20K in Spare Backup stock and passed on her shares.

Fast forward a few years, and my wife's old company sells to AT&T.  At roughly 20X the price we would have paid for the stock.  And my sure thing?  Screen shot attached.  The ROI comparison between those two decisions is roughly infinity.  I never adjusted my cost basis, but I didn't get out quickly enough.  Got under $1,000 out of the deal.  Still brings back nightmares.  

Untitled 1.jpg

Posted (edited)

I held on to all my shares in Confederated Slave Holdings, Transatlantic Zeppelins, and the Baltimore Opera Hat Company b/c my lackey never told me about the big crash of '29.

ke5stzfk9xge1.jpeg

Edited by Storm the Field
Posted

Could have been PC's Limited Employee #128... All I would have had to do is stay breathing and employed and Dellionaire bigly status achieved. But I would be divorced a couple of times by now...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.



×
×
  • Create New...