our worst investments

Ah yes - wild and free - er ah frivolous!

Mad money - local utility(ILA) on the edge of bankrupcy. My good till cancel orders for STON and EGLE are unfilled yet - price is walking away from me.

Male hormones never die!

Odds are - some of my current holdings will someday be added to my worst investment list.

Dat's the name of that tune.

heh heh heh heh heh
 
..
*
 
gmb said:
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Thanks! I see now that my backsliding mistake was marrying a sailor.

Chris Sullivan was my Engineer during my JO tour on USS JAMES MONROE. It was an interesting time but apparently I didn't heed the warning signs.

BTW the rest of the board is depending on you to confirm my tall tales sea stories. I'm sure your PM Inbox is filling as I write this.

Hmmm... worst job... excessive oversight, ridiculously detailed regulations, extremely high tolerance for pain and long working hours... nuclear engineer... lawyer... nuclear engineer... lawyer... it's gonna take me a while to make a choice on this one. Which career field has more jokes?
 
gmb said:
In my mind, a good place to be from but not always a good place to be at. In large measure, however, USNA is responsible for much of the success (admittedly small) that I enjoy today
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USMA, '78. Agree w/your statement about good place to be from. One of my best investments was Wharton MBA. My worst investment was buying tech stocks when the market was on its way down during the Crash (catching the falling knife). The prices seemed good at the time but they got lot's better. Example: Corning fell to less than $2/share and has recently recovered to where I bought in.
 
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gmb said:
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I'll tell ya, defending the submarine culture around here has been a pretty lonely job...

... of course I prefer to execute that defense from the back lanai with a frosty beverage.
 
Mine was getting sucked into Stratton Oakmont (Long Island boiler room stock promotor that the movie was based on) back in the early 90's. Lost $45k. Thank god DW decided not to trade me in. :p [I asked a similar question on my first post here. Always good to see the humility. I think it is key to success in life.]
 
My worst investment is my work 401-k. Nearly all of the funds have a poor performance record coupled with ridiculously high fees (surprise, surprise). I sure wish I could roll the 401k into my personal IRA, without quitting the job!
 
Papi said:
My worst investment is my work 401-k. Nearly all of the funds have a poor performance record coupled with ridiculously high fees (surprise, surprise). I sure wish I could roll the 401k into my personal IRA, without quitting the job!
Click to expand...

Funny, I was just heading to the "best investment" thread to post about my 401(k) there. Come to think of it, I guess it's pure luck my company used Vanguard and had several good funds to choose from. I didn't know the difference back then...I was about to say I wouldn't have thought anything if they put all my money in company stock, but that's not true as I was in the stock-buy program for 6 months then quit realizing (at the young age of 20-21) I had both my income and savings invested in the same place, and if the company tanked I could lose both. But anyway, I suppose it could've been the worst investment if it didn't happen to be a good trustee with good investment choices, and at the time I wouldn't have known the difference.
 
Looks like even the bondholders get no cash; and the old stockholders get nada. Tough business.

Ha
 
I haven't done anything too stupid, but my husband let a FA talk him into buying stocks in each of his daughter's college funds. He still owns the stock in there! I am sick of lecturing him about what a huge mistake this is. He has no idea what he paid for it.
 
Commodities on margin through a M-L broker just before my ship left for a short deployment. Money? What money?
 
in 2000 my wife was working for AT&T. The big buzz around there was the impending IPO for the spinoff AT&T Wireless. All the higher ups were pushing it, telling the employees this was a rare opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a hot company. Everyone was taking out 2nd mortgages etc. to get in this thing. We ended up investing 100k all on margin. The stock never went anywhere, then tanked. The bubble burst on the stock market, then the margin calls came in. By the time it was over, We lost around 100K- 130K.
 
Cut-Throat said:
I had too much $$$ in Company Stock. Lost $175K on paper in about 2 weeks. But overall I had a big gain. I should have diversified out of it.
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Same here but no gain. Was in the stock purchase plan at SGI. I kept waiting for the stock to go up enough that I could at least cover the taxes I had to pay on the %15 discount. About a year ago they went bankrupt. Goodbye about $40,000.
 
From one of my first posts on this forum:

TargaDave said:
Worst: I actually got suckered into investing with Stratton Oakmont sometime around 94. They were the infamous Long Island boiler room IPO operation. loss => $45k. Completely my fault and plenty of stress on the marriage since the wife wasn't paying much attention to the investments at the time. Will never forget that lesson in greed and gullibility
Click to expand...

By no means a savvy investor now, just not as pathetically dumb as then.
 
All this company stock talk reminded me of another one. When megacorp was purchased by mega-megacorp one division was a high tech something or other. High tech gets spun off just before high tech meltdown. Watched in disbelief as value of my high tech spinoff went down over $100,000 in my portfolio. I was confident it would come back. Hasn't yet; doubt it ever will.
 
The second worst is TMFZ. Bot 2.6 nearly three years ago, now .3, still holding. It cost me 13k, 80% of my Roth IRA

The worst is that I bot 6k CNEH @.4 with all my left Roth. Sold it @1.18. In next four days, CNEH got 4.5.
 
Maybe I missed it but I didn't see anyone list this one.

MEDICAL!!

This was my worst "investment" I got misdiagnosed and wasted 3 years treating a disease I never had.

Lots of money completely lost...you can't even sell out at pennies on the dollar!

Jim
 
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