TinyEvel
10-09-2008, 01:09 AM
I'll tell you about the first time I got into the stock market.
I had just been married. My wife and I were renting a one-bedroom apartment in a so-so part of town and both working mid-level career jobs. We were making above-average wages and were saving a decent amount of money in hopes to buy a home within two years.
The stock market was rising rapidly. We were in the middle of the dot-com "gold rush" and I was anxious to get my own share of the "free money" that was flowing into my friends' online accounts.
I told my wife, "Let's just put one-third of our savings into the market, it will turn into...like...TRIPLE that within a year and then we'll pull it out."
She trusted that I knew what I was doing and so I opened our DATEK online trading account with $10,000 opening balance.
The date was January 12, 2000.
If you know anything about the stock market, that was two days before the Dow Jones hit its highest point in history, and pretty much the top of a steep, downward slope. By June of that year, my online account was worth about $130.
By the time I finally decided to close the account and sell off the 1500 shares of the online casino stock I had purchased over the OTCBB, the price of the sale was not even enough to cover the site's transaction fee.
To me, it seemed like there was no hope for the future, at all. I felt like a complete sucker.
But that was just a unique unusual time, and I lost a lot less than most of my friends who had put a lot more money into their accounts. So, looking at the market now, and comparing this time to that (even though we don't know what the next few months holds) I'd say its not like we're going to lose it all, just lose some (I know that doesn't make it better right now, but you only realize the loss if/when you cash it out. Hold on and it will grow again).
Just look at this 20-year NASDAQ chart, the market grew back quite a bit from Jan. 2000. And who's to say we'll ever se that kind of frenzy/dip again?
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5EIXIC#chart2:symbol=^ixic;range=my;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalu es=0;logscale=on;source=undefined
I had just been married. My wife and I were renting a one-bedroom apartment in a so-so part of town and both working mid-level career jobs. We were making above-average wages and were saving a decent amount of money in hopes to buy a home within two years.
The stock market was rising rapidly. We were in the middle of the dot-com "gold rush" and I was anxious to get my own share of the "free money" that was flowing into my friends' online accounts.
I told my wife, "Let's just put one-third of our savings into the market, it will turn into...like...TRIPLE that within a year and then we'll pull it out."
She trusted that I knew what I was doing and so I opened our DATEK online trading account with $10,000 opening balance.
The date was January 12, 2000.
If you know anything about the stock market, that was two days before the Dow Jones hit its highest point in history, and pretty much the top of a steep, downward slope. By June of that year, my online account was worth about $130.
By the time I finally decided to close the account and sell off the 1500 shares of the online casino stock I had purchased over the OTCBB, the price of the sale was not even enough to cover the site's transaction fee.
To me, it seemed like there was no hope for the future, at all. I felt like a complete sucker.
But that was just a unique unusual time, and I lost a lot less than most of my friends who had put a lot more money into their accounts. So, looking at the market now, and comparing this time to that (even though we don't know what the next few months holds) I'd say its not like we're going to lose it all, just lose some (I know that doesn't make it better right now, but you only realize the loss if/when you cash it out. Hold on and it will grow again).
Just look at this 20-year NASDAQ chart, the market grew back quite a bit from Jan. 2000. And who's to say we'll ever se that kind of frenzy/dip again?
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5EIXIC#chart2:symbol=^ixic;range=my;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalu es=0;logscale=on;source=undefined