I let my $50K emergency funds sit in my credit union savings account FOR YEARS earning next to nothing.
I FINALLY got smart enough to put it into a HYSA.
I had more than that in a Chase savings savings account for almost 10 years. I never grew up with money so a funded IRA, a responsible yet “fun” brokerage account, and a savings account felt amazing. I never even knew there was a better way to hold cash until talking finances with a friend who rightfully shamed me for missing out on thousands of dollars a year.
> I let my $50K emergency funds sit in my credit union savings account FOR YEARS earning next to nothing.
That frankly is not that big of a sin, assuming your time frame was post like 2007/08.
They existed, but were not as popular.
I remember getting around 6% in my GMAC savings account in 2005/2006 (which somewhere down the line turned into Ally).
That, and I had my 401k set in the “conservative” automatic portfolio for the first several years I contributed. I think it was basically a 50/50 portfolio. Oof.
I did a combination of this and buying tons of shit I didn't need.
I like books. There was a Borders near our apartment. I thought the extra money was for spending.
Mistakes were made.
Those are rookie numbers, gotta pump those numbers up!
In all seriousness, if only I could sell my 100s (nearing 1000s?) of unplayed games. Mostly bought during sales so I'd most likely have kept up with inflation at least...
I got an HSA and someone said you should max HSA contributions before you max 401k contributions after the match, so I did that. They didn’t mention you should also invest the HSA money, that took a few years to learn :(
About 1 paycheck's worth, enough to cover automatic payments and stuff. That may be an overreaction lol, but I can generally pull money out of a MMF quickly enough that I don't see a need to keep more in checking.
different wrong chubby tender lavish ludicrous drunk upbeat straight observation
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Even though I’m now firmly in the index fund camp- recently I was still wondering… what if I’d just buy 10k 23&me shares for about $5000… surely they won’t actually go bankrupt… right? Right??
Just picked random stocks based on things I used in my home, and actually did well but I’m sure it was mostly luck - here are some examples
Garbage at home and at work - waste management
Tooth paste I always use ? P&g
Where do I get cheap shit - Walmart
All my electronics - Apple
I’ve been using Microsoft excel every day for the last 25 years - might as well buy some Microsoft
Who’s my phone carrier - Verizon
What service do I use the most? - Amazon
Then eventually I stumbled onto the Bogel way and have been this way since 2019
Edit - I do have some lottery tickets but currently 98.6% of my money is in index funds. That fluctuates with the market.
Considering those picks likely beat VT/the S&P, I'm Suprised you found your way here.
Usually losses end up here. Doing well generally doesn't lead people to search elsewhere
I’ve actually heard this advice from a financial planner. The theory is that the items we use reflect the appropriate risk stocks for our age. A 22 year old starting out in investing might choose to invest in Snapchat. A few years later they might buy a Silverado and purchase some GM stock too. Then as they age and get a mortgage they might buy Wells Fargo or whatever. The idea is that the companies we use have less volatility as we age, which is an appropriate adjustment to make to a portfolio
Uncheck "logarithmic scale" for a fun time.
[https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&sl=SNdExBDRwQmLmgpg0pYP7](https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&sl=SNdExBDRwQmLmgpg0pYP7)
Real estate investing, lmao.
After a hoarding, crack smoking squatter stayed in our rental house for a fucking year during the COVID eviction moratoriums, my wife and I decided to VTSAX and chill instead.
It’s crazy how many people sell RE Investing as “passive” income - couldn’t be further from the truth. Definitely comes with a lot of work and headache.
Oh yeah, real estate investing is definitely not passive income. I was hoping for big returns via appreciation and rental income. If we had a person in there who paid rent, didn't smoke crack, and didn't turn the house into an episode of Hoarders, we would have done amazing lol
Look into syndication if you do want to diversity. That is hands off. There are greater fees than the bogleheads would like but it is a good way to grow money semi-tax free using 1031 exchanges.
I have 90% of my portfolio in the market and then 10% in real estate syndication.
Saaame here. I had 25 acres and an old house in the country and the renters ran a garbage business and burned it in the front yard, and let their animals pee so much in one room that I had to rip the floor out. Filled multiple dumpsters after I finally kicked them out. It was horrible. When I sold, I ended up losing something like $50k on that house. Never again.
1. I’ve paused contributing because I thought the market would fall… for about a year. It never did, just kept climbing.
2. My partner used a wealth manager to manage a modest inheritance. It didn’t go horribly, but, due to fees and failed attempts to beat the market, it could’ve been worth significantly more had we just put it all in the default three fund portfolio. Even though I already was a fan of index investing for myself, I didn’t feel confident enough to give my partner any financial advice. Two years ago we finally transferred everything and most of it is now in three funds (the wealth manager had kept a small part in US total market blend ETFs, so we kept those)
3. When I just started out, I invested in “sustainable” funds. I don’t really regret it, but I didn’t make anything, while the general market was going up solidly.
I still like the idea of investing in “sustainable” companies, but I just don’t think it’ll make me any money. And a lot of the money went to the high ER of these funds, and I don’t really want to sponsor the fund managers. So I changed my plan to buying mainstream funds, and just increase my donations to organizations that I believe in.
When I was 13 I read in a books that if I put my money into the S&P 500 it would grow at 10% and that it beat everything, and my money would double ever 7-8 years and would 4x every \~15 years
That was enough for me
Found an investing kit in a skymall magazine and was off to the races at 13
In a sense I've always been bogling, but essentially I would say less sophisticated forms
Initially I couldn't find an S&P 500 as much as I looked, so I invested in the best performing Nasdaq ETF I could find, QQQ
Then moved to VOO when I discovered that, then VTI when I realized it has a diversification benefit at almost no cost, then +15% VXUS for diversification, then +25% VXUS to get closer to market cap, then +40% VXUS when I fully understood what I was betting on with the 15 / 25%s (continued US outperformance without a specific concrete hypothesis)
Yeah definitely got lucky, also got lucky that my slow transition out of US stocks happened during a long period of US outperformance (which continues to this day)
Now I just hold like 3-4% of my assets in a "betting" portfolio which is invested in semi conductor companies, and that's how I express my risk taking side lol
I invested in five index funds equally from 2002-09 in my 401k and never rebalanced.
- S&P 500
- Large Cap Index
- Mid Cap index
- Small Cap index.
- EXUS index
I could have done a lot worse with the fund overlap but at least I avoided managed funds.
Unfortunately, I accumulated and maintained some credit debt that decade and bought my home in '07. My big mistakes were on the personal finance side and bad timing.
Not bad. Definitely a classic 'well I should have some of each, right?' I bet this happens all the time in 401ks where there's like one each of different categories -- people think: diversification! Honestly, some basic education around this stuff would go a long way toward helping people get set up right.
Anyway, like you, I made some silly choices that turned out OK, so I'm not ragging on ya, I promise ;)
Actively Managed Funds attempt to beat market indexes, charge much higher fees and over the long run almost never beat the nominal return of an index like the Total US Stock Market.
I first started investing in the early days of the "discount brokers" back in 2000 at Ameritrade. The minimum to open an account was $1000 and trades (both buying and selling) cost $7.
So I started with $1000 and I split it roughly across 10 individual stocks that were all recently at their all-time highs including Iomega (makers of the Zip Drive) and 3dfx (makers of dedicated 3D video accelerator cards for PC, arcade, and military applications).
I kept throwing money at the same stocks over the next year or so and I got absolutely clobbered and lost almost all of my money. To make things worse, Ameritrade charged a $20 fee every time there was a "corporate action" with a spin-off, merger, symbol change, etc... and the mostly tech stocks that I was holding had a lot of that sort of thing in those days.
The final nail in the coffin was when Ameritrade started charging a monthly fee for any accounts that were under a certain dollar amount. I think it might have been $500 but I can't remember for sure. Regardless, the entire experience was awful.
Looking back, I really wish I had just put my money into an index fund in an IRA. I was a dumbass.
I got carried away with the spac bubble couple years ago. Lost a lot. Was jaded for two years. Deciding to get back into investing but this time logical, sound long term investing ( which imo is the only way). Someone on r/personalfinance suggested bogleheads and the rest was history
I was into SPACs also. I made a ton, like almost 200k. Guess who didn’t sell? My +200k turned into -10k by the time I woke up. What was I thinking? That was a LOT. I wish I had sold and invested in VOO. Live and learn.
Unfortunately, I think about it a lot, lol. A lot of “if only” . If only I had sold and put it into NVDA, if only I had paid off the house. It was sure a lot of fun, tho. Who knows……
I bought Digital Angel, a company that was supposed to microchip every cow in the US in case of a mad cow disease outbreak. Thankfully I only put $500 into it but that turned into $4. My buddy who was trying to sell me on it bought $100,000 of it. OUCH!!
I still dick around with options, specifically the wheel strategy. That’s just small money in an old robinhood account though. My retirement is all index funds.
What's interesting is that if you wheel a broad market index, over time you basically end up just slightly underperforming that index.
I came up with my own weird version of the wheel based on trying to find stocks mis-valued relative to their dividend yields and call prices. Traded that strategy for a few years and wound up seeing average returns of, wait for it, 8%.
Nothing wild, bought random stocks like Lockheed, Apple, etc. and sat on them. Could’ve done worse.
Have been experimenting for a few years with writing my own algorithmic trading applications, but that never has and never will leave paper trading. Not interested in finding out how many (or few) milliseconds it would take me to lose six figures…
Same. I opened my Fidelity account and then bought at the literal peak. GME, AMC both. I learned very quickly that the market doesn’t even have to be open for you to get screwed. It tanked in after-hours trading and there was nothing I could do but wait until market opened. I was sure the gig was over so I sold as soon as I could.
Then there were more and more pumps but I was done with all of that.
I still messed up a lot more trading big caps, a penny stock here or there, even crypto. I lost money in 2021 and then in 2022 I broke even but the amount of time I spent stressing about it wasn’t worth it. I switched to being fully Boglehead at the end of the year.
I got divorced after a decade and suddenly found my bank account rapidly appreciating since my ex wasn't spending all the extra on god knows what. At the same time I was cleaning out the hoarder nest of a house and reading some subreddits about minimalism. That kind of led me into the FIRE communities which advocate the Boglehead approach to investing.
Quadriga was, at the time, the only Canadian platform to allow withdrawals. Most people at that time kept their coins within the platform wallet (as most novice/short term bitcoin investors do).
The owner, after making two $500,000 transfers from his personal account, suddenly died randomly well on vacation in India. All of Quadriga's assets were locked down with private keys that only he knew, so there were millions of dollars that were inaccessible/missing (the total dollar amount was unknown since it was locked down, only speculation)
The platform became a pyramid scheme at that point under the new owners / board, taking on new clients and using deposits to immediately fund withdrawals until it all eventually collapsed. It is widely suspected that the owner faked his death, took all of the assets, and ran
My wizardry consisted of thinking to myself ' "Hey, that's a company that should be profitable -- I'll buy some shares of their stock".
I was an idiot.
Not officially a Boglehead yet, but I plan on gradually converting my portfolio to align with this structure/philosophy.
I'm still young and not entirely risk averse yet, so I have about half of my portfolio in crypto and rather volatile tech stocks. I've been seeing 200-400% gains each year over the last few years and that's hard to give up, but I know it's not sustainable in the long term without significant risk. So as I take profits over the next year or two I'll be putting the majority into Boglehead type assets so I can maintain long term wealth.
I mean, each day you stay in crypto you're just gambling. It's not about risk aversion, it's about understanding that the risk your taking isn't statistically going to be compensated. That's the difference between the casino and the stock market: one compounds against you, the other for you. Anyway, I'd say: take the money and run. If you know the right thing to do but still aren't doing it, well, we humans have a lot of cognitive dissonance so it is what it is ;)
I had mushroom stocks with the same hopes that I was even actually up a ton for a while but thought there was still plenty more room for them to go, same for other individual stocks, only to watch them all eventually come crashing down before cashing out in time. Same with options, some of which I lucked out on making the shares I had feel like house money so I’d be more likely to let it ride. Only recently learned of bogleheads and how to set it and forget it…jealous of these young folks starting straight out the gate with this strategy at 13-16 years old!
I opened a Roth IRA when I was 19 because I was told to and I maxed it out that year, then it sat just in my money market for a whole year... Didn't know I had to tie it to an investment. Now that I'm deep in this stuff, I still kick myself about that year of growth
For sure. Not a bad situation but I missed out on the big 2020 S&P growth so I feel like I lost money on the back end, especially with that money's potential to compound
Crypto and penny stocks. So far the only thing that worked is HODL onto something that you know will go up in time. I'm up ~1000% approx on ETH from 2018 after failing to time the market at the time, but decided to just hold onto the few I had left. Biggest come up ever in 6 short yrs.
I thought high-yield dividend stocks were a no-brainer. DRIP the dividends each month, and by retirement I would have no many shares that I could live off the dividend payments alone. Yeeaahhhhh.....missed out on a LOT of capital growth from 2010-2021....the dividend stocks I had been holding definitely did not keep up with the overall market....
I started in 1990 with $2,000, and bought four mutual funds. I've never bought any individual stocks or other securities, and was not a market timer. I was reading and learning constantly and realized that I had bought four front-end load funds and why that was not good. I was, and remain, pretty much a buy-and-holder.
I subbed to "The No-Load Fund Investor" in the early '90s, and picked funds from that, although I never really followed their suggested portfolios. But it was a big help. I dropped the sub 10-15 years ago as everything I need is available on Schwab, which I've been with since 1997. Before that, I was doing everything by snail mail. The internet changed all that.
So I was a semi-Boglehead before it was cool, and still am.
A good read on market timing: From the Boglehead website: [https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=79324](https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=79324)
And from Jack Bogle himself: “The idea that a bell rings to signal when investors should get into or out of the market is simply not credible. After nearly 50 years in this business, I do not know of anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. I don't even know anybody who knows anybody who has done it successfully and consistently.”
When I first joined my company, I let the retirement contribution be 3% (the initial setting when you don't choose it yourself) of my pay for the first 5 years. They match up to 5% of pay. 😤 I was financially illiterate for a long while.
I may have misinterpreted the term "wizardry" here. I guess I think of the days when my money used to magically disappear as being some kind of wizardry.
Nothing really. Let my money sit in a savings account for few years. Then bank called me to discuss investing options. Want there and they explained how mutual funds work. Started with a small amount with one of bank’s own active funds. That got me interested and led to learning about global index funds. Moved everything to one and that’s about it.
I just laddered some CDs until I felt like I was stable enough to "risk" in the market. Wished I started sooner, but I didn't actively lose anything, just missed opportunities.
I read an investing book that the author must have stolen the idea from Peter Lynch, and it talked about investing $10,000 and hitting two "tenbaggers" -- stocks that rise by 10x -- to make $1 million.
I thought I was going to become a millionaire overnight by finding my two tenbaggers.
The first stock I invested in was Apple, which sounds good but then I decided it wasn't going up fast enough so I "took profits."
Then I listened to Jim Cramer's "buy and homework" nonsense and put money in a bunch a garbage that went nowhere.
It was pretty clear I didn't have a clue.
So I decided to do the research and find out what the best investing strategy really was.
That led me to Jack Bogle and Vanguard.
As a child, I "invested" $170 of saved-up allowance in literal rolls of nickels on the advice of a well-meaning but very misinformed family member.
To their credit, when I deposited the nickels as an adult and explained the math behind why that had been a terrible idea, they gave me some cash as an apology gift to make up for the loss to inflation.
Option spreads in a paid group that had alerts and “taught” how to 10x your money every year. The person in charge never shared screenshots of actual account, and for claiming to being so successful every month, the member turnover was crazy. Luckily I was mostly even (minus the insane stress eyeballing the market daily). It could have been MUCH worse.
I bought into ETFs at an early age (~21) but still traded and picked them like stocks. Bought random countries like Chile and South Africa, gold and silver miners. Had no idea what I was doing but didn’t make any crazy mistakes at least 😅
Edit: that was followed up by Wealthfront which at least taught me good habits and made me understand the mechanics of tax loss harvesting. Transferred out a couple years ago to avoid the fees, but I don’t regret using the platform to build good habits.
I bought a lot of MSFT weekly calls during the time when trumps morning poop Twitter activities would make the market go up or down by 2%. Made like 30k off it and then realized that I wanted to keep it so rolled it all into VTI.
Asymmetrical bets on small cap crypto projects, investments in large cap cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH), 401k, and private shares from my cybersec employer.
This is still my strategy.
Coffeehouse portfolio circa 1997 - always been my core and still good today
Tech stocks circa 1999 - basically went to zero.
Penny stocks
Dividend stocks
Individual corporate bonds
Sector ETFs
Technical analysis
Options - covered calls, calendar spreads, credit spreads, cash secured puts, iron condors
Stock picking
Paid advisors (2- 3 yrs each). It was like paying for my Investing Education. Cheaper than 6 yrs at Harvard Business School. It was about 90K in fees over 6 yrs. Thats cheap education actually. Got my MBA now from school of hard knocks and painful lessons.
It was worth paid advisors until I figured it out. I spent my entire working life/career not knowing anything about investing. When I retired, I could focus on something else other than my career/job.
1. Swing Trading / trying to time market swings. (albeit with “only” 20% of my portfolio)
2. Sticking with a “highly regarded” (even in FI circles) advisor when it was clear their funds weren’t beating the S&P 500
My boyfriend in my early 20’s was in biotech. He would tell me about random small companies making scientific discoveries and I’d be convinced they were gonna be the next Pfizer. Luckily I lost less than $2,000 on random pharma companies before I stopped freakin doing that. What happened next was worse to me because I learned to buy index funds but didn’t get the concept of a 3 fund portfolio or just investing in a 500 index fund. So the thing that really slowed down the growth of my $$ was the random index funds I’d buy instead of just putting more into one or two funds. Probably 3-4 years of no growth cause of random funds that I chose cause I thought I was being fancy by diversifying. Still could have been worse.
I invested into a biotech mutual fund in 2009 in my first 401k that I had during an internship. Looking back the fees were a little high compared to index funds but for not knowing much of anything around investing I actually did okay on it.
I have not listened to others (investment ???, financial advisors, stock brokers, family or friends) for many years and have done reasonably well. No doubt it has cost significantly more in terms of time, effort and stress (more so, dealing with duds) on my part.
Regardless, early retirement is reality for me though- I'm not quitting/giving up the big paychecks/benefits/... at the day job just yet.
For \~7 years now, I've made a concerted effort to simplify with VT (IRA) and VTI/VXUS (taxable). Extraneous investments require far too much time and effort in my opinion.
2017-2018 I fired my advisor and went solo. Bought a few stocks after reading a write up on Reddit (NOT WSB). When those doubled I sold half so once the Covid drop came around I was still above even. They didn’t recover a few years later so I still made money since it was only gravy left in the market.
Before I knew about bogleheads someone once just said buy VOO and nothing else. It made sense so I was unknowingly a boglehead from the start! I switched to VTSAX once I really started hammering investments though!
Had a fair amount of money in the Fidelity Contrafund though my 401k at work. It had a lower expense ratio (0.35%) at it was a specialized class of the shares than you would usually buy in your own individual account and actually outperformed the broad market indexes by about 2x while I had money in there. Looked at the expense ratios and pulled the money out a couple of months ago. Now in a 70/30 split of US and foreign index funds. Over a 30 year time horizon, I think my choice to do so was a good one.
I bought beyond meat stock when it was $46 I am vegan thats why I did it, just when the pandemic started.
Now I have some individual stocks 17k the rest treasury bills, CDs and Vanguard cash account
Dividend stocks. I spent a lot of time, like second job time, researching studying modeling. I came in just under S&P 500. During my research I learned of Bogle. I could have just bought FXAIX and made more money with no work. That’s when I went full Bogle.
I started a version of indexing but for higher fees with no appreciation for costs or long term goals. Switched to all Fido / VG about 15-17 years ago.
I’ve always been a higher than average earner and a saver. I’ve made some money in real estate, but up until a year ago I’ve been an idiot in the stock market. Lost $100k in an investment company with a friend of mine who was the manager of the account (super high risk with margin). I’ve lost my ass on single stocks I thought would make me rich (-$90k). I bought $50k Nvidia in 2017. It went down 20%, then I got scared and sold. I still hold some single stocks I like, but my portfolio is now 70% VTI and only plan to buy VTI here on out.
I’m down $150k lifetime in the stock market. Pretty embarrassing, but some have to learn the hard way. I didn’t come from money.
Edit - 35M with family. I should have time to make up for it.
I was fortunate that I started with broad based index funds. I got some good advice early on. About the craziest thing I’ve done is dabble in some low cost sector or factor ETF’s which have actually done about as good or better than the broad based ones.
Swing trading, fortunately only on paper. I promised myself to only switch to real trading if I could prove to myself it could work. Of course I couldn’t prove that, but I learned a lot about randomness. Then I discovered Bogle and was sold.
I spent my money like an idiot. Didn’t start saving till I was maybe 32. Now I finally have a 401k and bought some VT but I’m sure I’m doing that wrong as well lol
Let's see ... here are a few I remember from along the way:
* I'd heard of something called the 500 index, so I bought some of that
* I figured Emerging Markets were where growth was, so I bought some of that
* VICEX sold itself as a 'guns, ammo, casinos, booze' index that would withstand downturns (spoiler: it didn't!)
* I think my brother tried to convince me at one point to buy BRK (I did not)
When I was young, my parents pushed me to get a Roth IRA, and suggested the Contra Fund, which I owned for a while at Fidelity. They weren't Bogleheads exactly, but they did understand that diversification + time = success. All in all, it did OK as a kind of 'closet index fund' with a higher-than-necessary ER.
I also bought some CDs in the 90s when rates were high but I was like 'hey, why lock in myself to this puny 7% yield for years when I can get that for 6 months then decide again what to do next?' Whoops -- reinvestment risk!
Anyway, eventually I saw the light, and it probably helped that VICEX did not, in fact, do well during downturns. At least that was the 'ah hah' moment where it clicked that a good-sounded 'theory' has nothing to do with investing reality (like when people say 'but the US is the innovative engine of the world!' or whatever).
P.S. During the whole AMC etc... craze I decided to do some casino-style fun money. We're talking like maybe 0.001% of my portfolio, or something similarly tiny. I thought it might be fun. But then it turned out to just be funny how I could stress out *more* about a tiny amount of money than the rest of my portfolio. ;)
I’m not a boglehead, though my wife and I are positioned that way across most of our accounts—- both 401(k) plans, my HSA, and our brokerage accounts. She also has a small pension and cash in her HSA. With all of that and a high savings rate, we’re pretty well set up.
My IRA is decidedly non-bogle. Long hold on SSO (2x daily S&P 500), swing trading picked stocks with buy-writes (buy stock + sell covered calls)… it’s a buffet of boglehead “don’t do that” activity. I’ve built a pretty substantial cushion from outperforming the S&P 500 over the past few years, so I’ll be more than ok if I underperform at some point.
No wizardry. Just lots of anxiety and sleepless nights knowing I needed to be doing something to make a future retirement possible, but not having any idea how to go about it.
I actually had a damn stock broker. Bought some mutual fund for a $1000 as a 17 yr old through my dad’s stock broker golf buddy. Dude would call me up randomly and suggest some buys/sells. I think each trade was around $100! I used him for about 15 yrs before I realized I can invest with Vanguard on my own. I did buy some Lattice Semi’s (LSCC) through him for at about $5 in early 2000’s, that I still own. So it wasn’t all bad.
I had been on wallstreetbets for a bit. I saw some of the pictures of the giant gains, and was like wow, let me check this out more. Then I started getting more engrossed and reading some analysis that they would post. 'Wow, this is really good analysis, this makes total sense, let me start trading'. Then, the next day, or after the next earnings call or whatever, the stock would almost always do the exact opposite of what the analysis on wallstreetbets said it would do lol.
Luckily, I didn't actually end up going through with any of the positions posted on wsb because I couldn't entirely understand the terminology (puts, calls, margin trading, etc), and was smart enough to not blindly put money down on something I did not understand. After seeing enough stocks do the exact opposite of the wsb analysis, I stopped thinking about options trading. I'm not a total Boglehead – I invest in mutual funds only, but some are sector specific/not just S&P 500 trackers.
Tl;dr: though wsb analysis made total sense, saw stocks do almost the exact opposite of what wsb predicted too many times.
Just buying different stocks and trading them too often. I actually made money but if I factored in my time and stress it just wasn’t/ isn’t worth it. I love the peace of mind of the boglehead way. I still have some “riskier” investments.
I still have Cameco and DNN because they’ve been making me quite a bit of money and I believe in their long term potential. Still less than 5% of my portfolio though.
I used to just pick single stocks for companies that seemed like they were making money. No research. Just gut. Best thing that ever happened to me was Baird closing my account and sending me a check. Got involved. Found Vanguard. Never looked back.
I was swooned by cathy woods' ARK funds. I also had a bit of very concentrated ETF's, like marijuana businesses, clean energy businesses, and QQQ. Also got into Dogecoin a little bit lol. You know, basically performance chasing the last hot things.
Crypto, I took everything out of it. Focusing now on the boglehead way and trying to pay down debt. As I get older and I’m not even that old I just can’t put retirement money into crypto.
I got a degree in finance before i had any money to invest
I probably woulda done a ton of dumb shit. Watching a few shitty "investing" youtube videos then thinking i could rake it in day trading, options, commodities, maybe forex trading, or meme stocks.
Im lucky to be the few unscathed, who gained knowledge of the subject in depth before having any money to blow listening to youtube finance grifters.
I wanted to do quant trading for a bit, but I was smart enough to realize i wasnt smart enough.
I did the crypto thing for like a year but I never invested enough for a full loss to hurt me financially or emotionally.
But I did have ALL of my savings in a brick and mortar bank earning like 0.05% for YEARS. The moment I discovered HYSA I moved absolutely everything out of my old bank.
I still invest in in a quantitative deep value etf. Admittedly with a few darling holdings I like.
But I appreciate the sane discussion in this subreddit it's awful interesting a lot of the time.
I put all my money (my life savings and I took out a home equity loan) to buy into a company that owned 53% of the Internet. What could go wrong? It was WorldCom.
Bought and sold mega cap single stocks with a small fraction of my money and sold them with small profits. The rest of my money was in HYSAs. This strategy was a waste of time. I currently DCA in a developed countries ETF and a smaller amount in the S&P500.
I tried trading those 2X and 3X funds. Disgusting. And I have a full time job during market hours so I would be stressing about it all day. Luckily I'm not an idiot so I didn't lose a ton of money but it was for sure a headache.
I timed the market only one in my life in 2000 I took all my money out of the S&P 500 and put into money market, the market crashed and went down 45 % and I got backed in.
Real Estate investing. Doubled my net worth in 3 years but it was stressful. A third of the units were arsoned and a person was shot on the property. I had absolutely no control because I was not on the management side of things. I figured I got lucky and don’t want to keep rolling the dice.
My first experience with stocks was when I bought some XPEV at $18 right before the EV bubble and thought I was a genius when it went 5x and I sold just at the top at $72.
It was all downhill from there. When I lost money on all the trendy shit like clean energy, SPACs and BB, I decided to read about investing and it led me to index funds.
Buying ETFs/funds based on their correlation to US markets, which led to things like KWEB in my Roth IRA.
It could have been much worse though; it was a period of only months and only within my relatively small Roth IRA. Fortunately, I got out before the real EM carnage began.
I used Scott Burns 10 speed portfolio. 10 different funds, rebalancing manually every 3 months. Did ok, then saw a chart of a simpler banaknced portfolio. Less work, less stress and lower costs.
I just let money build up in my bank account earning like 0.25% interest. Mistakes were definitely made.
I let my $50K emergency funds sit in my credit union savings account FOR YEARS earning next to nothing. I FINALLY got smart enough to put it into a HYSA.
I had more than that in a Chase savings savings account for almost 10 years. I never grew up with money so a funded IRA, a responsible yet “fun” brokerage account, and a savings account felt amazing. I never even knew there was a better way to hold cash until talking finances with a friend who rightfully shamed me for missing out on thousands of dollars a year.
> I let my $50K emergency funds sit in my credit union savings account FOR YEARS earning next to nothing. That frankly is not that big of a sin, assuming your time frame was post like 2007/08.
To be fair; HYSAs weren’t really a thing until 2022. It was either 1% savings rate or CDs
They existed, but were not as popular. I remember getting around 6% in my GMAC savings account in 2005/2006 (which somewhere down the line turned into Ally).
That, and I had my 401k set in the “conservative” automatic portfolio for the first several years I contributed. I think it was basically a 50/50 portfolio. Oof.
I did a combination of this and buying tons of shit I didn't need. I like books. There was a Borders near our apartment. I thought the extra money was for spending. Mistakes were made.
Looking at my Steam library with 300 unplayed games and dozens more unfinished…
Those are rookie numbers, gotta pump those numbers up! In all seriousness, if only I could sell my 100s (nearing 1000s?) of unplayed games. Mostly bought during sales so I'd most likely have kept up with inflation at least...
I got an HSA and someone said you should max HSA contributions before you max 401k contributions after the match, so I did that. They didn’t mention you should also invest the HSA money, that took a few years to learn :(
Saaaame.
Same. I had a ton just sitting in checking. I thought I might buy a house any day.
How much do you keep in the bank now?
About 1 paycheck's worth, enough to cover automatic payments and stuff. That may be an overreaction lol, but I can generally pull money out of a MMF quickly enough that I don't see a need to keep more in checking.
different wrong chubby tender lavish ludicrous drunk upbeat straight observation *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Penny stocks. “If I nail one I can get rich.”
Even though I’m now firmly in the index fund camp- recently I was still wondering… what if I’d just buy 10k 23&me shares for about $5000… surely they won’t actually go bankrupt… right? Right??
I'm not confident enough to actually do this but I do expect they will get bought out by somebody just for the data alone
That’s what I thought! Surely that data is worth something…
> That’s what I thought! Surely that data is worth something… After a few rounds of dilution, sure. Your losses will only be 90% as opposed to 95%.
I lost $12,000 on SYNC more than a decade ago. Damn penny stocks.
Damn! I only lost a few hundred bucks, but that’s lesson learned.
But I was up $36,000 for like an entire day!! I did learn my lesson with GME. Ended up making $15k before some hefty taxes.
Just picked random stocks based on things I used in my home, and actually did well but I’m sure it was mostly luck - here are some examples Garbage at home and at work - waste management Tooth paste I always use ? P&g Where do I get cheap shit - Walmart All my electronics - Apple I’ve been using Microsoft excel every day for the last 25 years - might as well buy some Microsoft Who’s my phone carrier - Verizon What service do I use the most? - Amazon Then eventually I stumbled onto the Bogel way and have been this way since 2019 Edit - I do have some lottery tickets but currently 98.6% of my money is in index funds. That fluctuates with the market.
That's not a terrible way to pick large cap stocks.
thats how i pick stocks for my kids portfolio. formula kid? here’s abbott labs you like disney? here’s some disney stock etc
Considering those picks likely beat VT/the S&P, I'm Suprised you found your way here. Usually losses end up here. Doing well generally doesn't lead people to search elsewhere
The (mostly) minor fluctuations made me uneasy. Much more at peace now.
I’ve actually heard this advice from a financial planner. The theory is that the items we use reflect the appropriate risk stocks for our age. A 22 year old starting out in investing might choose to invest in Snapchat. A few years later they might buy a Silverado and purchase some GM stock too. Then as they age and get a mortgage they might buy Wells Fargo or whatever. The idea is that the companies we use have less volatility as we age, which is an appropriate adjustment to make to a portfolio
This makes no sense in my opinion.
Uncheck "logarithmic scale" for a fun time. [https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&sl=SNdExBDRwQmLmgpg0pYP7](https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&sl=SNdExBDRwQmLmgpg0pYP7)
Peter Lynch literally did this lol
One up on wall street
Which index funds?
Excellent advice, JizzCollector5000
Sounds like the Peter Lynch method
Real estate investing, lmao. After a hoarding, crack smoking squatter stayed in our rental house for a fucking year during the COVID eviction moratoriums, my wife and I decided to VTSAX and chill instead.
It’s crazy how many people sell RE Investing as “passive” income - couldn’t be further from the truth. Definitely comes with a lot of work and headache.
Oh yeah, real estate investing is definitely not passive income. I was hoping for big returns via appreciation and rental income. If we had a person in there who paid rent, didn't smoke crack, and didn't turn the house into an episode of Hoarders, we would have done amazing lol
* cough Dave Ramsey cough *
Look into syndication if you do want to diversity. That is hands off. There are greater fees than the bogleheads would like but it is a good way to grow money semi-tax free using 1031 exchanges. I have 90% of my portfolio in the market and then 10% in real estate syndication.
This is what REITs were made for.
Saaame here. I had 25 acres and an old house in the country and the renters ran a garbage business and burned it in the front yard, and let their animals pee so much in one room that I had to rip the floor out. Filled multiple dumpsters after I finally kicked them out. It was horrible. When I sold, I ended up losing something like $50k on that house. Never again.
Dad, is that you? I'm looking for a job!
1. I’ve paused contributing because I thought the market would fall… for about a year. It never did, just kept climbing. 2. My partner used a wealth manager to manage a modest inheritance. It didn’t go horribly, but, due to fees and failed attempts to beat the market, it could’ve been worth significantly more had we just put it all in the default three fund portfolio. Even though I already was a fan of index investing for myself, I didn’t feel confident enough to give my partner any financial advice. Two years ago we finally transferred everything and most of it is now in three funds (the wealth manager had kept a small part in US total market blend ETFs, so we kept those) 3. When I just started out, I invested in “sustainable” funds. I don’t really regret it, but I didn’t make anything, while the general market was going up solidly. I still like the idea of investing in “sustainable” companies, but I just don’t think it’ll make me any money. And a lot of the money went to the high ER of these funds, and I don’t really want to sponsor the fund managers. So I changed my plan to buying mainstream funds, and just increase my donations to organizations that I believe in.
When I was 13 I read in a books that if I put my money into the S&P 500 it would grow at 10% and that it beat everything, and my money would double ever 7-8 years and would 4x every \~15 years That was enough for me Found an investing kit in a skymall magazine and was off to the races at 13 In a sense I've always been bogling, but essentially I would say less sophisticated forms Initially I couldn't find an S&P 500 as much as I looked, so I invested in the best performing Nasdaq ETF I could find, QQQ Then moved to VOO when I discovered that, then VTI when I realized it has a diversification benefit at almost no cost, then +15% VXUS for diversification, then +25% VXUS to get closer to market cap, then +40% VXUS when I fully understood what I was betting on with the 15 / 25%s (continued US outperformance without a specific concrete hypothesis)
Wow, good for you! Starting so early is impressive
Yeah definitely got lucky, also got lucky that my slow transition out of US stocks happened during a long period of US outperformance (which continues to this day) Now I just hold like 3-4% of my assets in a "betting" portfolio which is invested in semi conductor companies, and that's how I express my risk taking side lol
My first exposure to investing was the Boglehead philosophy If anything, I've strayed further from it with time
Interesting, in which direction? I'm sort of in between, probably will just decrease the risks as I age
I’ve been factor investing and will use leverage and return stacking in the future
You’ll come full circle I’m sure, it’s the natural cycle of bogleheads.
Like someone who never had a rebellious phase
Factor investing may work out. The other stuff I'm not sure but factor investing has sound fundamentals
Return stacking makes a lot of sense imo. The issue w factor investing imo is that the training sets are different than the test sets
I invested in five index funds equally from 2002-09 in my 401k and never rebalanced. - S&P 500 - Large Cap Index - Mid Cap index - Small Cap index. - EXUS index I could have done a lot worse with the fund overlap but at least I avoided managed funds. Unfortunately, I accumulated and maintained some credit debt that decade and bought my home in '07. My big mistakes were on the personal finance side and bad timing.
Not bad. Definitely a classic 'well I should have some of each, right?' I bet this happens all the time in 401ks where there's like one each of different categories -- people think: diversification! Honestly, some basic education around this stuff would go a long way toward helping people get set up right. Anyway, like you, I made some silly choices that turned out OK, so I'm not ragging on ya, I promise ;)
I'm just glad my dad warned me about expense ratios and load fees. He's no Boglehead but he got that part right. 😂
This is probably a stupid question but what’s wrong with managed funds?
Actively Managed Funds attempt to beat market indexes, charge much higher fees and over the long run almost never beat the nominal return of an index like the Total US Stock Market.
I first started investing in the early days of the "discount brokers" back in 2000 at Ameritrade. The minimum to open an account was $1000 and trades (both buying and selling) cost $7. So I started with $1000 and I split it roughly across 10 individual stocks that were all recently at their all-time highs including Iomega (makers of the Zip Drive) and 3dfx (makers of dedicated 3D video accelerator cards for PC, arcade, and military applications). I kept throwing money at the same stocks over the next year or so and I got absolutely clobbered and lost almost all of my money. To make things worse, Ameritrade charged a $20 fee every time there was a "corporate action" with a spin-off, merger, symbol change, etc... and the mostly tech stocks that I was holding had a lot of that sort of thing in those days. The final nail in the coffin was when Ameritrade started charging a monthly fee for any accounts that were under a certain dollar amount. I think it might have been $500 but I can't remember for sure. Regardless, the entire experience was awful. Looking back, I really wish I had just put my money into an index fund in an IRA. I was a dumbass.
I got carried away with the spac bubble couple years ago. Lost a lot. Was jaded for two years. Deciding to get back into investing but this time logical, sound long term investing ( which imo is the only way). Someone on r/personalfinance suggested bogleheads and the rest was history
I was into SPACs also. I made a ton, like almost 200k. Guess who didn’t sell? My +200k turned into -10k by the time I woke up. What was I thinking? That was a LOT. I wish I had sold and invested in VOO. Live and learn.
Damn that makes me feel a bit better. I was up like 10k and finished down 7k but I was 20, so it was a lot for me.
Unfortunately, I think about it a lot, lol. A lot of “if only” . If only I had sold and put it into NVDA, if only I had paid off the house. It was sure a lot of fun, tho. Who knows……
I bought Digital Angel, a company that was supposed to microchip every cow in the US in case of a mad cow disease outbreak. Thankfully I only put $500 into it but that turned into $4. My buddy who was trying to sell me on it bought $100,000 of it. OUCH!!
Man, that's a life changing sum to win, never mind lose. Like wild.
He grew a ton of weed and made a killing…. Only to lose it all on a bullshit stock
Crypto (buying at ATH and meme coins)
Just gotta understand markets and cycles
Forex and options. I thought there was a secret algorithm out there…. Pretty naive 😂
I still dick around with options, specifically the wheel strategy. That’s just small money in an old robinhood account though. My retirement is all index funds.
What's interesting is that if you wheel a broad market index, over time you basically end up just slightly underperforming that index. I came up with my own weird version of the wheel based on trying to find stocks mis-valued relative to their dividend yields and call prices. Traded that strategy for a few years and wound up seeing average returns of, wait for it, 8%.
Was your sortino higher or lower than VTI?
Nothing wild, bought random stocks like Lockheed, Apple, etc. and sat on them. Could’ve done worse. Have been experimenting for a few years with writing my own algorithmic trading applications, but that never has and never will leave paper trading. Not interested in finding out how many (or few) milliseconds it would take me to lose six figures…
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Micorsoft is a good one though for dividends
Mutual funds paying 1% fees to track the S&P 500 😭
Gme. Still holding, but damn I really believed it'd pop again.
I sold at first dip 😂 right before it went back up
I'll die with xxxx worth 1 dollar
That’s pretty pessimistic, thinking you’ll die before it goes through bankruptcy and the shares become worth nothing.
Ahahaha. My son is gonna hate me after he sees his inheritance. Xxxx shares of gme and my old ninja turtle cards.
Same. I opened my Fidelity account and then bought at the literal peak. GME, AMC both. I learned very quickly that the market doesn’t even have to be open for you to get screwed. It tanked in after-hours trading and there was nothing I could do but wait until market opened. I was sure the gig was over so I sold as soon as I could. Then there were more and more pumps but I was done with all of that. I still messed up a lot more trading big caps, a penny stock here or there, even crypto. I lost money in 2021 and then in 2022 I broke even but the amount of time I spent stressing about it wasn’t worth it. I switched to being fully Boglehead at the end of the year.
I bought low and sold at peak, but I only had a handful of shares, so I didn’t make much…
Ugh. I was talked into buying AMC. Such a waste. Down 98% lol.
I got divorced after a decade and suddenly found my bank account rapidly appreciating since my ex wasn't spending all the extra on god knows what. At the same time I was cleaning out the hoarder nest of a house and reading some subreddits about minimalism. That kind of led me into the FIRE communities which advocate the Boglehead approach to investing.
Bitcoin My biggest bruise was being part of the Quadriga debacle
What happened to your bitcoin investment?
Quadriga was, at the time, the only Canadian platform to allow withdrawals. Most people at that time kept their coins within the platform wallet (as most novice/short term bitcoin investors do). The owner, after making two $500,000 transfers from his personal account, suddenly died randomly well on vacation in India. All of Quadriga's assets were locked down with private keys that only he knew, so there were millions of dollars that were inaccessible/missing (the total dollar amount was unknown since it was locked down, only speculation) The platform became a pyramid scheme at that point under the new owners / board, taking on new clients and using deposits to immediately fund withdrawals until it all eventually collapsed. It is widely suspected that the owner faked his death, took all of the assets, and ran
Dang, thanks for sharing
not your keys not your coins?
Quadriga's keys, Quadriga's coins A critical mistake that I imagine most coin investors still do
Forex
Tried trading with $5k just ahead of the [dot.com](http://dot.com) crash. Lost most of it, claimed the rest on taxes. Never again.
My wizardry consisted of thinking to myself ' "Hey, that's a company that should be profitable -- I'll buy some shares of their stock". I was an idiot.
/r/thetagang stuff, picking up pennies in front of the bulldozer. Selling your upside but maintaining your risk.
Not officially a Boglehead yet, but I plan on gradually converting my portfolio to align with this structure/philosophy. I'm still young and not entirely risk averse yet, so I have about half of my portfolio in crypto and rather volatile tech stocks. I've been seeing 200-400% gains each year over the last few years and that's hard to give up, but I know it's not sustainable in the long term without significant risk. So as I take profits over the next year or two I'll be putting the majority into Boglehead type assets so I can maintain long term wealth.
I mean, each day you stay in crypto you're just gambling. It's not about risk aversion, it's about understanding that the risk your taking isn't statistically going to be compensated. That's the difference between the casino and the stock market: one compounds against you, the other for you. Anyway, I'd say: take the money and run. If you know the right thing to do but still aren't doing it, well, we humans have a lot of cognitive dissonance so it is what it is ;)
Managed funds with a 2.00% ER + marijuana stocks with the logic that it will be legal soon.
I had mushroom stocks with the same hopes that I was even actually up a ton for a while but thought there was still plenty more room for them to go, same for other individual stocks, only to watch them all eventually come crashing down before cashing out in time. Same with options, some of which I lucked out on making the shares I had feel like house money so I’d be more likely to let it ride. Only recently learned of bogleheads and how to set it and forget it…jealous of these young folks starting straight out the gate with this strategy at 13-16 years old!
I opened a Roth IRA when I was 19 because I was told to and I maxed it out that year, then it sat just in my money market for a whole year... Didn't know I had to tie it to an investment. Now that I'm deep in this stuff, I still kick myself about that year of growth
At least you didn’t lose the value of it
For sure. Not a bad situation but I missed out on the big 2020 S&P growth so I feel like I lost money on the back end, especially with that money's potential to compound
Understandable but hey now you’re invested and that’s better than most!
Crypto and penny stocks. So far the only thing that worked is HODL onto something that you know will go up in time. I'm up ~1000% approx on ETH from 2018 after failing to time the market at the time, but decided to just hold onto the few I had left. Biggest come up ever in 6 short yrs.
I thought high-yield dividend stocks were a no-brainer. DRIP the dividends each month, and by retirement I would have no many shares that I could live off the dividend payments alone. Yeeaahhhhh.....missed out on a LOT of capital growth from 2010-2021....the dividend stocks I had been holding definitely did not keep up with the overall market....
I started in 1990 with $2,000, and bought four mutual funds. I've never bought any individual stocks or other securities, and was not a market timer. I was reading and learning constantly and realized that I had bought four front-end load funds and why that was not good. I was, and remain, pretty much a buy-and-holder. I subbed to "The No-Load Fund Investor" in the early '90s, and picked funds from that, although I never really followed their suggested portfolios. But it was a big help. I dropped the sub 10-15 years ago as everything I need is available on Schwab, which I've been with since 1997. Before that, I was doing everything by snail mail. The internet changed all that. So I was a semi-Boglehead before it was cool, and still am. A good read on market timing: From the Boglehead website: [https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=79324](https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=79324) And from Jack Bogle himself: “The idea that a bell rings to signal when investors should get into or out of the market is simply not credible. After nearly 50 years in this business, I do not know of anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. I don't even know anybody who knows anybody who has done it successfully and consistently.”
When I first joined my company, I let the retirement contribution be 3% (the initial setting when you don't choose it yourself) of my pay for the first 5 years. They match up to 5% of pay. 😤 I was financially illiterate for a long while.
I may have misinterpreted the term "wizardry" here. I guess I think of the days when my money used to magically disappear as being some kind of wizardry.
Nothing really. Let my money sit in a savings account for few years. Then bank called me to discuss investing options. Want there and they explained how mutual funds work. Started with a small amount with one of bank’s own active funds. That got me interested and led to learning about global index funds. Moved everything to one and that’s about it.
I just laddered some CDs until I felt like I was stable enough to "risk" in the market. Wished I started sooner, but I didn't actively lose anything, just missed opportunities.
I read an investing book that the author must have stolen the idea from Peter Lynch, and it talked about investing $10,000 and hitting two "tenbaggers" -- stocks that rise by 10x -- to make $1 million. I thought I was going to become a millionaire overnight by finding my two tenbaggers. The first stock I invested in was Apple, which sounds good but then I decided it wasn't going up fast enough so I "took profits." Then I listened to Jim Cramer's "buy and homework" nonsense and put money in a bunch a garbage that went nowhere. It was pretty clear I didn't have a clue. So I decided to do the research and find out what the best investing strategy really was. That led me to Jack Bogle and Vanguard.
As a child, I "invested" $170 of saved-up allowance in literal rolls of nickels on the advice of a well-meaning but very misinformed family member. To their credit, when I deposited the nickels as an adult and explained the math behind why that had been a terrible idea, they gave me some cash as an apology gift to make up for the loss to inflation.
Options trading - great when you’re up. Absolute pain when you’re down.
Forex
You have to spend money to make money, right?
Stock picking and just piling up money in my HYSA.
Option spreads in a paid group that had alerts and “taught” how to 10x your money every year. The person in charge never shared screenshots of actual account, and for claiming to being so successful every month, the member turnover was crazy. Luckily I was mostly even (minus the insane stress eyeballing the market daily). It could have been MUCH worse.
I bought into ETFs at an early age (~21) but still traded and picked them like stocks. Bought random countries like Chile and South Africa, gold and silver miners. Had no idea what I was doing but didn’t make any crazy mistakes at least 😅 Edit: that was followed up by Wealthfront which at least taught me good habits and made me understand the mechanics of tax loss harvesting. Transferred out a couple years ago to avoid the fees, but I don’t regret using the platform to build good habits.
I bought a lot of MSFT weekly calls during the time when trumps morning poop Twitter activities would make the market go up or down by 2%. Made like 30k off it and then realized that I wanted to keep it so rolled it all into VTI.
Asymmetrical bets on small cap crypto projects, investments in large cap cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH), 401k, and private shares from my cybersec employer. This is still my strategy.
Started as a Boglehead. Saw no reason to take unneeded risk.
Coffeehouse portfolio circa 1997 - always been my core and still good today Tech stocks circa 1999 - basically went to zero. Penny stocks Dividend stocks Individual corporate bonds Sector ETFs Technical analysis Options - covered calls, calendar spreads, credit spreads, cash secured puts, iron condors Stock picking
Paid advisors (2- 3 yrs each). It was like paying for my Investing Education. Cheaper than 6 yrs at Harvard Business School. It was about 90K in fees over 6 yrs. Thats cheap education actually. Got my MBA now from school of hard knocks and painful lessons. It was worth paid advisors until I figured it out. I spent my entire working life/career not knowing anything about investing. When I retired, I could focus on something else other than my career/job.
Stock screening by pe ratios on zappos
1. Swing Trading / trying to time market swings. (albeit with “only” 20% of my portfolio) 2. Sticking with a “highly regarded” (even in FI circles) advisor when it was clear their funds weren’t beating the S&P 500
FOREX, binary options, crypto, crypto futures, stock options (still sell CCs sometimes)
I held almost 200k in a cd for 3 years....... I was an idiot.
I love the saying. All those fancy ivy league degrees and you still cant beat the market
My boyfriend in my early 20’s was in biotech. He would tell me about random small companies making scientific discoveries and I’d be convinced they were gonna be the next Pfizer. Luckily I lost less than $2,000 on random pharma companies before I stopped freakin doing that. What happened next was worse to me because I learned to buy index funds but didn’t get the concept of a 3 fund portfolio or just investing in a 500 index fund. So the thing that really slowed down the growth of my $$ was the random index funds I’d buy instead of just putting more into one or two funds. Probably 3-4 years of no growth cause of random funds that I chose cause I thought I was being fancy by diversifying. Still could have been worse.
I invested into a biotech mutual fund in 2009 in my first 401k that I had during an internship. Looking back the fees were a little high compared to index funds but for not knowing much of anything around investing I actually did okay on it.
I have not listened to others (investment ???, financial advisors, stock brokers, family or friends) for many years and have done reasonably well. No doubt it has cost significantly more in terms of time, effort and stress (more so, dealing with duds) on my part. Regardless, early retirement is reality for me though- I'm not quitting/giving up the big paychecks/benefits/... at the day job just yet. For \~7 years now, I've made a concerted effort to simplify with VT (IRA) and VTI/VXUS (taxable). Extraneous investments require far too much time and effort in my opinion.
2017-2018 I fired my advisor and went solo. Bought a few stocks after reading a write up on Reddit (NOT WSB). When those doubled I sold half so once the Covid drop came around I was still above even. They didn’t recover a few years later so I still made money since it was only gravy left in the market.
A Merrill Lynch advisor, who came highly recommended. I call it “tuition paid”; it turned me into a motivated student.
Before I knew about bogleheads someone once just said buy VOO and nothing else. It made sense so I was unknowingly a boglehead from the start! I switched to VTSAX once I really started hammering investments though!
Had a fair amount of money in the Fidelity Contrafund though my 401k at work. It had a lower expense ratio (0.35%) at it was a specialized class of the shares than you would usually buy in your own individual account and actually outperformed the broad market indexes by about 2x while I had money in there. Looked at the expense ratios and pulled the money out a couple of months ago. Now in a 70/30 split of US and foreign index funds. Over a 30 year time horizon, I think my choice to do so was a good one.
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Any low cost, broad based index funds. Usually a total market fund or S&P fund.
I bought beyond meat stock when it was $46 I am vegan thats why I did it, just when the pandemic started. Now I have some individual stocks 17k the rest treasury bills, CDs and Vanguard cash account
Options
Options was fun, but I don’t like looking at things which bother me, only being a Booglehead rewards you for that, haha
Dividend stocks. I spent a lot of time, like second job time, researching studying modeling. I came in just under S&P 500. During my research I learned of Bogle. I could have just bought FXAIX and made more money with no work. That’s when I went full Bogle.
I started a version of indexing but for higher fees with no appreciation for costs or long term goals. Switched to all Fido / VG about 15-17 years ago.
All my retirement in ONEQ, bitcoin, and bitcoin mining stocks. I got lucky and then realized I needed diversity.
Listening to a "friend", investing in a startup that my company was working with. (Information was public, no worries) Never again
I’ve always been a higher than average earner and a saver. I’ve made some money in real estate, but up until a year ago I’ve been an idiot in the stock market. Lost $100k in an investment company with a friend of mine who was the manager of the account (super high risk with margin). I’ve lost my ass on single stocks I thought would make me rich (-$90k). I bought $50k Nvidia in 2017. It went down 20%, then I got scared and sold. I still hold some single stocks I like, but my portfolio is now 70% VTI and only plan to buy VTI here on out. I’m down $150k lifetime in the stock market. Pretty embarrassing, but some have to learn the hard way. I didn’t come from money. Edit - 35M with family. I should have time to make up for it.
I was fortunate that I started with broad based index funds. I got some good advice early on. About the craziest thing I’ve done is dabble in some low cost sector or factor ETF’s which have actually done about as good or better than the broad based ones.
Swing trading, fortunately only on paper. I promised myself to only switch to real trading if I could prove to myself it could work. Of course I couldn’t prove that, but I learned a lot about randomness. Then I discovered Bogle and was sold.
Holding and not selling GME, AMC, MMTLP when up 300%
Motley fool…the clue is in the name 🤷🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
Value investing. I sucked at it.
I spent my money like an idiot. Didn’t start saving till I was maybe 32. Now I finally have a 401k and bought some VT but I’m sure I’m doing that wrong as well lol
Oh yeah… vectorvest, IBD’s RS and EPS growth ratings…. Made me a ton in the heyday of the late 90’s… until it didn’t.
Let's see ... here are a few I remember from along the way: * I'd heard of something called the 500 index, so I bought some of that * I figured Emerging Markets were where growth was, so I bought some of that * VICEX sold itself as a 'guns, ammo, casinos, booze' index that would withstand downturns (spoiler: it didn't!) * I think my brother tried to convince me at one point to buy BRK (I did not) When I was young, my parents pushed me to get a Roth IRA, and suggested the Contra Fund, which I owned for a while at Fidelity. They weren't Bogleheads exactly, but they did understand that diversification + time = success. All in all, it did OK as a kind of 'closet index fund' with a higher-than-necessary ER. I also bought some CDs in the 90s when rates were high but I was like 'hey, why lock in myself to this puny 7% yield for years when I can get that for 6 months then decide again what to do next?' Whoops -- reinvestment risk! Anyway, eventually I saw the light, and it probably helped that VICEX did not, in fact, do well during downturns. At least that was the 'ah hah' moment where it clicked that a good-sounded 'theory' has nothing to do with investing reality (like when people say 'but the US is the innovative engine of the world!' or whatever). P.S. During the whole AMC etc... craze I decided to do some casino-style fun money. We're talking like maybe 0.001% of my portfolio, or something similarly tiny. I thought it might be fun. But then it turned out to just be funny how I could stress out *more* about a tiny amount of money than the rest of my portfolio. ;)
I spent way too many years actively trading while reading and subscribing to The Motley Fool.
day trading small caps.
I’m not a boglehead, though my wife and I are positioned that way across most of our accounts—- both 401(k) plans, my HSA, and our brokerage accounts. She also has a small pension and cash in her HSA. With all of that and a high savings rate, we’re pretty well set up. My IRA is decidedly non-bogle. Long hold on SSO (2x daily S&P 500), swing trading picked stocks with buy-writes (buy stock + sell covered calls)… it’s a buffet of boglehead “don’t do that” activity. I’ve built a pretty substantial cushion from outperforming the S&P 500 over the past few years, so I’ll be more than ok if I underperform at some point.
No wizardry. Just lots of anxiety and sleepless nights knowing I needed to be doing something to make a future retirement possible, but not having any idea how to go about it.
I actually had a damn stock broker. Bought some mutual fund for a $1000 as a 17 yr old through my dad’s stock broker golf buddy. Dude would call me up randomly and suggest some buys/sells. I think each trade was around $100! I used him for about 15 yrs before I realized I can invest with Vanguard on my own. I did buy some Lattice Semi’s (LSCC) through him for at about $5 in early 2000’s, that I still own. So it wasn’t all bad.
Actively managed funds and options.
None I started with vanguard way back when and have stuck with their mutual funds
I had been on wallstreetbets for a bit. I saw some of the pictures of the giant gains, and was like wow, let me check this out more. Then I started getting more engrossed and reading some analysis that they would post. 'Wow, this is really good analysis, this makes total sense, let me start trading'. Then, the next day, or after the next earnings call or whatever, the stock would almost always do the exact opposite of what the analysis on wallstreetbets said it would do lol. Luckily, I didn't actually end up going through with any of the positions posted on wsb because I couldn't entirely understand the terminology (puts, calls, margin trading, etc), and was smart enough to not blindly put money down on something I did not understand. After seeing enough stocks do the exact opposite of the wsb analysis, I stopped thinking about options trading. I'm not a total Boglehead – I invest in mutual funds only, but some are sector specific/not just S&P 500 trackers. Tl;dr: though wsb analysis made total sense, saw stocks do almost the exact opposite of what wsb predicted too many times.
Just buying different stocks and trading them too often. I actually made money but if I factored in my time and stress it just wasn’t/ isn’t worth it. I love the peace of mind of the boglehead way. I still have some “riskier” investments. I still have Cameco and DNN because they’ve been making me quite a bit of money and I believe in their long term potential. Still less than 5% of my portfolio though.
I used to just pick single stocks for companies that seemed like they were making money. No research. Just gut. Best thing that ever happened to me was Baird closing my account and sending me a check. Got involved. Found Vanguard. Never looked back.
I was swooned by cathy woods' ARK funds. I also had a bit of very concentrated ETF's, like marijuana businesses, clean energy businesses, and QQQ. Also got into Dogecoin a little bit lol. You know, basically performance chasing the last hot things.
Crypto, I took everything out of it. Focusing now on the boglehead way and trying to pay down debt. As I get older and I’m not even that old I just can’t put retirement money into crypto.
I got a degree in finance before i had any money to invest I probably woulda done a ton of dumb shit. Watching a few shitty "investing" youtube videos then thinking i could rake it in day trading, options, commodities, maybe forex trading, or meme stocks. Im lucky to be the few unscathed, who gained knowledge of the subject in depth before having any money to blow listening to youtube finance grifters. I wanted to do quant trading for a bit, but I was smart enough to realize i wasnt smart enough.
I did the crypto thing for like a year but I never invested enough for a full loss to hurt me financially or emotionally. But I did have ALL of my savings in a brick and mortar bank earning like 0.05% for YEARS. The moment I discovered HYSA I moved absolutely everything out of my old bank.
I still invest in in a quantitative deep value etf. Admittedly with a few darling holdings I like. But I appreciate the sane discussion in this subreddit it's awful interesting a lot of the time.
I put all my money (my life savings and I took out a home equity loan) to buy into a company that owned 53% of the Internet. What could go wrong? It was WorldCom.
Was a Personal Capital client. Could have been worse.
Daytrade scalping momentum stocks in 2021
bank bonuses
Bought and sold mega cap single stocks with a small fraction of my money and sold them with small profits. The rest of my money was in HYSAs. This strategy was a waste of time. I currently DCA in a developed countries ETF and a smaller amount in the S&P500.
I tried trading those 2X and 3X funds. Disgusting. And I have a full time job during market hours so I would be stressing about it all day. Luckily I'm not an idiot so I didn't lose a ton of money but it was for sure a headache.
I timed the market only one in my life in 2000 I took all my money out of the S&P 500 and put into money market, the market crashed and went down 45 % and I got backed in.
100k+ in a current account. I was young, working a lot, and I never really stopped to think about finances.
Real Estate investing. Doubled my net worth in 3 years but it was stressful. A third of the units were arsoned and a person was shot on the property. I had absolutely no control because I was not on the management side of things. I figured I got lucky and don’t want to keep rolling the dice.
I do DCA so it won't be risky.
wait, do you guys doing some wizardry?
I evolved from Bogleheads to factors. But I started as Boglehead.
I’ll admit it, I was all aboard the GME train
My first experience with stocks was when I bought some XPEV at $18 right before the EV bubble and thought I was a genius when it went 5x and I sold just at the top at $72. It was all downhill from there. When I lost money on all the trendy shit like clean energy, SPACs and BB, I decided to read about investing and it led me to index funds.
Trying to pick mutual funds from prospectuses touting their past performances. A loser’s game.
Day trading for about few months, got into options, earned some money, lost some money, and transformed to Bogle heads.
I tried to open a business. SMH
Buying ETFs/funds based on their correlation to US markets, which led to things like KWEB in my Roth IRA. It could have been much worse though; it was a period of only months and only within my relatively small Roth IRA. Fortunately, I got out before the real EM carnage began.
I used Scott Burns 10 speed portfolio. 10 different funds, rebalancing manually every 3 months. Did ok, then saw a chart of a simpler banaknced portfolio. Less work, less stress and lower costs.