# Your worst investment mistakes?



## james4beach (Nov 15, 2012)

Usually on forums like this we're sharing our successes and great outcomes from our investments. To flip this around, I thought it might be interesting to share our worst investment mistakes. We could learn from each other's mistakes.

Here are my biggest screw-ups. Others have pointed out to me that this is considered my "tuition fee" for stock investing:

1. When I just started investing in stocks, I thought all I had to do was select one or two great winners. I thought I could just figure this out through intuition. Without doing much research, I put a substantial amount into Ballard Power only to watch it rapidly drop 70%. I've actually printed this stock chart and put it up in my wall to remind myself about ad hoc stock gambling.

2. I tried active stock & option trading (really gambling) for several years. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, and the occasional wins really energized me. I thought I was doing well at it! Then one day, I sat down and honestly analyzed the performance data for the last 5 years. To my horror, I found that I had a negative return. I would have done better in a savings account or GICs!

How about you?


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## STech (Jun 7, 2016)

1. Overthinking it. When I first started into this stuff, I felt so overwhelmed and hesitant to start, that it delayed me a little.

2. Too much cash. I'm fortunately/unfortunately in this spot right now. I'm still dollar cost averaging like I always have, but ever since I paid off the mortgage, the extra cash has been sitting in HISA, instead of stocks. Obviously I should've increased my DCA quite a bit, but still kept some cash for buying opportunity.


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## jargey3000 (Jan 25, 2011)

getting greedy


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## Eder (Feb 16, 2011)

BRE-X and other moose pasture I owned back in the day...no more miners etc for the last 25 years has been profitable.


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## twa2w (Mar 5, 2016)

My worst mistake has been listening to experts. Until some one told me to break the word down... An ex is a 'has been', and a spurt is a drip under pressure.

I collect share certs. Some of which I display.( not necessarily ones I own or owned)

As example

I keep a BreX share cert on my wall to remind me that if it sounds too good to be true it likely is and also to look at the fundamentals, not the story.

I also have a share cert from Intl Merchantile Marine, the company that built the Titanic ( not the company that owned it). It reminds me that even good companies suffer setbakes but recover and sometimes those are opportunities to buy.

And a couple of others.

Would love to get a Nortel certificate, or a copy.

Cheers


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## Just a Guy (Mar 27, 2012)

Trying to invest outside of my investment personality. Saw an obvious pump and dump scenario unfold in front of me, got in fairly early, watched it go up, knew exactly when it was going to tank too...but got distracted right around the time I knew it would fall and didn't even preprogram a sell order. Stock tanked as expected, lost the entire amount. Of course I later wrote it off as a capital loss, but realized I'm just not a trader, I'm a buy and hold value investor. 

Price of my financial education.


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## agent99 (Sep 11, 2013)

Bought shares in Shore Gold. One of the largest kimberlite/diamond deposits anywhere. Saw stock go from $2 to $8. Held on expecting mine to be developed. Still have my shares. Trading at about 18c. Rio Tinto just became involved. Seems they are getting 2/3 of company for almost nothing. 

Other than that, other mistakes wer buying mutual funds from our bank and dealing with a FS broker. Just fees reduced returns by about 2%.


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## stantistic (Sep 19, 2015)

*My boo-boo*

From 2009 to 2014 preferred shares had been, more or less, a bastion of stability. Then early in 2015 they (on average), began to tank. I was familiar with trend lines, but could not believe what I was seeing . I did not realize that what I was seeing was the consequence of 5 year re-sets appearing for the first time after the crash of 08-09 combined with low 5 year bond rate.

I stuck with them to the bottom for a loss in the multi-thousands. But since the start of 2017, they have partway recovered.


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## Rusty O'Toole (Feb 1, 2012)

stantistic said:


> From 2009 to 2014 preferred shares had been, more or less, a bastion of stability. Then early in 2015 they (on average), began to tank. I was familiar with trend lines, but could not believe what I was seeing . I did not realize that what I was seeing was the consequence of 5 year re-sets appearing for the first time after the crash of 08-09 combined with low 5 year bond rate.
> 
> I stuck with them to the bottom for a loss in the multi-thousands. But since the start of 2017, they have partway recovered.


I would have thought that preferreds with their fixed dividend would perform like a bond, and go up when interest rates went down.
Have all preferred shares participated in this drop in value?


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## Jimmy (May 19, 2017)

Rusty O'Toole said:


> I would have thought that preferreds with their fixed dividend would perform like a bond, and go up when interest rates went down.
> Have all preferred shares participated in this drop in value?


There are several types. Perpetuals are like bonds . 'Reset' preferreds are different as they reset their dividend to yield ~ 1.5% above the 10 yr bond yield. This design is so they increase as bond yields increase.

I think simply what happened in 2015 when interest rates were cut from 1.5% to .5 %, bond yields fell similarly. So the dividend was cut ~ 50% to provide the lower yields for the preferreds. 

The NAV of the Reset preferred is the PV of the future dividends plus whatever the fave value is ( believe that stays the same) so overall it fell 50% too.

Anyway, these are ok in stable or rising interest rate environments


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## indexxx (Oct 31, 2011)

Went for a couple of penny stocks when I first started. Not huge amounts but lost some capital. Sold Ford and Visa near their lows several years ago instead of being patient. Also sold NVDA earlier this year after holding it from $32 up to $100; figured it was pushing my luck. Now it's at almost $200.

Bought LIQ about 18 months ago and watched it take a nosedive.

Biggest regret was seeing a pundit I respect on a TV interview going crazy recommending FB after it dived following the IPO. I'm not a fan of social media, and thought the potential monetization of FB was not going to materialize- said pundit was adamant that buying in at $18 was the best opportunity to come along in years, while everyone else was saying no way. I didn't listen...


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## milhouse (Nov 16, 2016)

Classics mistakes when I was way more loosey goosey with my non-registered account. 
1. Chasing yield while underestimating the strength of the underlying business. 
2. Catching a falling knife.

I bought Yellow Pages years ago for the yield. I bought into the propaganda that they could convert their physical directory business to an online business and ignored their debt. It pretty much went to zero for me but I wasn't DRIP'ing so I got some dollars out of it before getting punched in the face. LOL

I bought RIM stock on the way down when I thought they bottomed out but it took another step down. I haven't given up on them but it's been kind of dead money for me for the last half decade. Ideally, I should realize the loss and then buy back in after a month to avoid the superficial loss rule if I still want to hold onto it. At least there seems to be a flicker of a light at the end of the tunnel for Blackberry nowadays.


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## fatcat (Nov 11, 2009)

a) reading zero hedge and 2) not getting into the american market early and heavy after 08

mainly because i was doing to much of a) ...


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## gibor365 (Apr 1, 2011)

1. Buying PSN , luckily I invested little money there... it wasn't really a mistake, but victim to fraud
2. when about 5 years ago got scared and sold XIV with little loss about $10 and when CDN$ was at par with USD. Now XIV is $108


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## Jimmy (May 19, 2017)

Going through various boom /bubble cycles is always an education. In the late 90s the Nasdaq, tech etc were all the rage. The easy error was just to follow past returns and the latest 5 star funds w no guarantee of future successes. All of that came crashing down in 2000 when the tech bubble burst. Many funds fell 50-70%.

After that I spoke to my investment advisor at MD mgmt and started being more conservative and following better asset allocations. Index funds and bonds. Boring but steady. Will never invest in tech funds again no matter what the latest trend is. Went through the recession ok because I had held many of the funds since 2000 and enjoyed the run up and didn't have to panic sell to avoid losses.


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## james4beach (Nov 15, 2012)

fatcat said:


> a) reading zero hedge and 2) not getting into the american market early and heavy after 08
> 
> mainly because i was doing to much of a) ...


Same here. I was reading too much ZeroHedge too. It took me a while to pick up on their heavy anti-America bias (which is a political thing for them).


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## My Own Advisor (Sep 24, 2012)

1. Invested in penny stocks in my early 20s.
2. Owned pricey mutual funds throughout my 20s.
3. Bought and sold too many stocks in my early 30s.
4. Still own a few hundred shares of CPG but can sell later for a good capital loss to offset sizable capital gains. 

I've since calmed down and become a fan of both indexing and buy-and-hold a number of CDN stocks for dividends and growth.


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## andrewf (Mar 1, 2010)

Listening to talking heads on TV. Also, most people who write articles for SA, zerohedge, motley fool. They are mostly bozos. It took me a while to gain sufficient understanding to see this.

For instance, whenever a talking head tries to explain why the dollar rose or the TSX fell, for the most part they are lying. They have no idea, not really. And if they knew where it would go with any confidence, they would be spending the time harvesting profits from options and not collecting appearance fees.


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## nobleea (Oct 11, 2013)

My Own Advisor said:


> 1. Invested in penny stocks in my early 20s.
> 3. Bought and sold too many stocks in my early 30s.


Me too. When I bought my first condo, I got a HELOC on it (pre-construction purchase, went up quite a bit before I moved in). Then proceeded to 'invest' most of the HELOC in stocks. Unfortunately, I was hooked on small cap mining stocks at the time. There was a discussion board similar to this that was quite popular. I think my worst investments came from that. Warrants in a small cap mining company would have been the worst investment. European Minerals (EPM-T) I think it was. It's now called Orsu Metals (nice chart).
Ah well, I think it's important that every investor goes through this phase, and hopefully early when the pain stings, but the dollar amounts are not huge.

The other bad 'investment' was not taking a job offer at RIMM when it was offered after graduation. Came with stock options. IF I had taken the job and IF I had kept the options to the peak, it would have been well in to the 7 figures. I know I wouldn't have been able to hold on to the peak though. I would've cashed out as soon as I could've bought an M5.


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## Userkare (Nov 17, 2014)

While working at Nortel, as the stock plummeted, believing the office scuttlebutt that the company was too big to fail, that Cisco would buy it, that the gov't would bail it out.

Bought 1000 shares when it hit $30, and it 'couldn't possibly go any lower'. :^(


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## milhouse (Nov 16, 2016)

My Own Advisor said:


> 2. Owned pricey mutual funds throughout my 20s.


Did that too combined with have an advisor, aka sales person, who pushed me to their own company's high fee mutual fund products. 
I could be wrong but I don't think the concept of how impacting fees are was very well talked about >15-20 years ago and correspondingly, not a lot of low fee mainstream products were available.


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## jargey3000 (Jan 25, 2011)

_2. Owned pricey mutual funds throughout my 20s_
MoA: That may be fine among "sophistcated" forum investors here, but would you agree that DOING that in your 20s (ie investing in something) is, at least, better than NOT investing at all - in your 20s? Believe it or not, there a lot of 20-somethings that have no clue-or interest- in investing at that age. Wouldn't THAT be a bigger mistake??


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## Ag Driver (Dec 13, 2012)

Deleted


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## My Own Advisor (Sep 24, 2012)

jargey3000 said:


> _2. Owned pricey mutual funds throughout my 20s_
> MoA: That may be fine among "sophistcated" forum investors here, but would you agree that DOING that in your 20s (ie investing in something) is, at least, better than NOT investing at all - in your 20s? Believe it or not, there a lot of 20-somethings that have no clue-or interest- in investing at that age. Wouldn't THAT be a bigger mistake??


Fair comment but the question was your worst mistakes - not others 

Kidding aside, _absolutely Jargey_, by not taking some sort of command of your own personal finances is a terrible mistake many 20-somethings make. I knew I needed to learn on my own 20 years ago otherwise I'd be in trouble later on.

Although we're doing OK, I still feel I'm playing catch-up to a few high NW 40-somethings who have already achieved FIRE by my age. Live and learn I guess but I'm also very thankful for what I have and the journey to date. You have to enjoy the ride regardless of the good and bad money decisions you make in life. Again, opportunities to live, learn and do better next time. 

Too bad so many young folks "have no clue-or interest- in investing at that age". They are certainly missing out on a get wealthy eventually strategy and seem to instead, prefer this you only live once lifestyle mantra.


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## james4beach (Nov 15, 2012)

My Own Advisor said:


> Although we're doing OK, I still feel I'm playing catch-up to a few high NW 40-somethings who have already achieved FIRE by my age.


There will always be someone who's doing better. And there a lot of people doing worse, though you won't hear them bragging about it. (People might also create the illusion that they're doing very well.)

In the end it's probably best to strive for your own level of comfort, whatever that is, without concern about what others are doing.


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## FIRE40 (Sep 27, 2017)

1. Not investing soon enough. I had substantial savings in a HISA in 2009-2010 and just let it sit there. I should have been investing along the way but didn't understand enough at the time to beat my nerves.
2. Dabbling in options trading, thinking I knew what I was doing. This was several years ago and I only ended up losing a few $1,000 before I realized this wasn't for me. It could have been much worse.


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## Eclectic12 (Oct 20, 2010)

FIRE40 said:


> 1. Not investing soon enough. I had substantial savings in a HISA in 2009-2010 and just let it sit there. I should have been investing along the way but didn't understand enough at the time to beat my nerves ...


Having watched people make the damaging decisions like selling low then re-buying middle to high because of their lack of understanding/nerves, I call this more of a regret than a mistake. 


Cheers


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## milhouse (Nov 16, 2016)

FIRE40 said:


> 1. Not investing soon enough. I had substantial savings in a HISA in 2009-2010 and just let it sit there. I should have been investing along the way but didn't understand enough at the time to beat my nerves.


I had a similar situation where I built up decent sized savings in a HISA but didn't invest it for a few years. At the time, I wasn't really happy with my advisor, wasn't familiar with ETF's, and didn't find my footing yet in selecting individual stocks. But wouldn't necessarily consider it my worst investment mistake. However, I'm likely paying the price in terms of lost opportunity from all the compounding I'd be reaping today.


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## Eclectic12 (Oct 20, 2010)

milhouse said:


> ... I could be wrong but I don't think the concept of how impacting fees are was very well talked about >15-20 years ago and correspondingly, not a lot of low fee mainstream products were available.


Part of the challenge is that while stuff like fees/commissions were discussed, what was easily available changed over time. A couple of examples are that No Load MF MERs that are high by today's standards were lower than the common MFs of the day. Similarly, a $39 commission is terrible for today but great for the days when commissions commonly were $150 to $200.

At the same time, it is easy to miss what was available as not many have know that XIU was created in 2001 while the precursor Toronto Index Participation Units (TIPS) was launched in 1990. TIPS did not suffer the same fate as the 1989 launched Index Participation Shares which traded on the ASE as well as teh PSE that a lawsuit stopped. The next US entry is reported as SPY, which launched in 1993.


Cheers


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## GalacticPineapple (Feb 28, 2013)

QSR.UN. How could chicken and pizza lose money.


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## Walksing (Oct 16, 2012)

not diversify , focused on energy stocks
chased high yield not quality of business and management


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## redsgomarching (Mar 6, 2016)

I would say one of my worst investment mistakes is not taking my education seriously at the start. if i had i would've been further off at my age but now am working twice as hard to get ahead.


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## kenshin (Nov 4, 2017)

Worst mistakes i've made in investing, number one is not investing/learning about it until now, only started investing in my early 30s, 2nd- going with a investment group that "manage" my funds, high fees and them not been able to outperform the market kinda pissed me off, took me to long to pull the trigger and transfer my funds out of their management into a self directed one. Really pissed me off because it was early this year that i was considering it, also had a list of stock i did want to own (tencent, alibaba, apple...) all these stocks are up a significant amount this year. It was a great learning experience thou, learned about stocks on the way, learned about value investing and how to evaluate a company properly, up by a huge amount since i started investing and stock picking myself since juin/july. But my biggest regret is really missing that the market at the begining of the year


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## verticalguy (Nov 3, 2017)

Not cutting my losses quickly enough. If it goes down, get out.


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## newfoundlander61 (Feb 6, 2011)

Mine was buying Nortel


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## Numbersman61 (Jan 26, 2015)

My biggest mistake was buying common stock in an exploration company called Arcan Resources which was involved in an oil play in Swan Hills area of Alberta. I had some concerns about management but thought they had a promising exploration play. So did CPG who bought just under 20%. First bad news was one of the founders and VP Production was stealing from the company (he’s now in jail), next they appear to have rejected overtures from CPG. At the end, the prospect was substantially downgraded and they ran into financial difficulties. I ended up losing $100,000. My lesson - invest in good management teams and avoid the ones with questionable track records.


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## Nerd Investor (Nov 3, 2015)

Pacific Rubiales Energy.

One of a few stocks I bought in the middle of the oil crash to play the recovery and the only one that blew up in my face, but boy did it blow up hard. 
It was ridiculously cheap by numerous metrics... until it wasn't. Got cheaper, I bought more to lower my cost base. There was a take over offer which would have net me a small profit, but shareholders voted against it on the board's recommendation that they were undervaluing the company. I had a couple of other opportunities to get out at a small loss/small profit, but I held on because I still had a number in mind closer to the previous take over option. By this point the fundamentals had deteriorated and debt was a serious issue. The stock had delisted, but I still held out hope for a pop on an acquisition. Finally, when bankruptcy was imminent, I sold while I could and took a massive loss. 

Worst part? It was in my TFSA


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## peterk (May 16, 2010)

Started buying Teck in my TFSA at $15-10, it promptly went to $4. Then I freaked out, sold it all and rebought in my un-registered account with the thought that "If it goes bankrupt at least I can write it off".

Now it's back at $25-30, and I've managed to turn a very nice 10k profit into a 10k permanent loss in my TFSA, and a 20k taxable capital gain. :hopelessness:


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## tragique (Sep 25, 2017)

verticalguy said:


> Not cutting my losses quickly enough. If it goes down, get out.


So much wrong with this...


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## AltaRed (Jun 8, 2009)

Chasing yield and/or potential turnaround stories, aka Yellow Pages and COS. I did get out before they bottomed out but what was I thinking when I should have known (did know) total return and business fundamentals are key. It's not like I wasn't an experienced investor either when I made these mistakes. Sometimes falling knives are sharp swords.


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## Thal81 (Sep 5, 2017)

Procrastinating about investing.


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## Dilbert (Nov 20, 2016)

Buying Nortel, CPG and TA :confusion:


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## olivaw (Nov 21, 2010)

I purchased flow-through shares on the advice of a broker without understanding what I was buying. I lost almost all of that investment.


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## jargey3000 (Jan 25, 2011)

^^^^ALL OF THE ABOVE!!!!!!^^^^


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## Beaver101 (Nov 14, 2011)

^ LOL! How long have you been in the markets for and did you buy anything? Eventually.

Worst investment for me were LVSFs ... and I thought I was helping small businesses and the economy in Ontario also!


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## jargey3000 (Jan 25, 2011)

Beaver101 said:


> ^ LOL! How long have you been in the markets for and did you buy anything? Eventually.
> 
> Worst investment for me were LVSFs ... and I thought I was helping small businesses and the economy in Ontario also!


just bought a bunch of NINE on a wait-&-see basis....


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## Beaver101 (Nov 14, 2011)

^ Why would you want to buy NINE on a wait-&-see basis....?? ... it has already dropped by 11%. Don't tell me your solid investment friend from the estate trust dep't gave you this NINE tip?


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## james4beach (Nov 15, 2012)

Besides ad hoc speculative trading (which was definitely my biggest mistake), another mistake I made was failing to stick to a consistent asset allocation.

For example, when I started, I was something like 80% Canadian index and 20% international index. Some years later I was 50/50 stocks and fixed income, but my allocation kept changing. Any of these would have been fine if I consistently did it, but I was constantly changing.

This is something I've only addressed in the last couple of years, and now I've decided on an asset allocation that I can stick to no matter what's going on in my life, i.e. employed / jobless / in school / stay at home parent


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## spdr1812 (Apr 8, 2016)

Selling LAC @ .80c ..


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## AltaRed (Jun 8, 2009)

FWIW, I would have less regrets about errors in a specific stock or two than I would about process and decision making. There are always individual stocks where we have buy, or sell, regrets but those are the odds in A Random Walk Down Wall Street. What is more important is systemic patterns in investment mistakes. J4B has a good example of that in post #48. I'd like to hear more about 'systemic' learnings. 

As I mentioned earlier, one of my weaknesses had been disproportionate influence by yield (no longer have that one). Another that I am not quite cured of is buying into weakness when I think the weakness is pretty much all there, but I don't wait long enough. More discipline needed sometimes in simply waiting until a stock truly bottoms, maybe double bottoms, before buying in. Yes, one will not get it at the bottom but that number is really only for bragging rights anyway.


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## spdr1812 (Apr 8, 2016)

" Another that I am not quite cured of is buying into weakness when I think the weakness is pretty much all there, but I don't wait long enough." by Alta 

Same here , CVE is a good example for me , when i seen the initial drop , but didn't even wait a day ...


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## AltaRed (Jun 8, 2009)

Oh, I wait for months usually, but even that doesn't do it a lot of the time. There are quite a few now, probably tax loss selling that are in downwards slides, e.g. TRI, CCL.B, ITP, ENB to name but a few.


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## spdr1812 (Apr 8, 2016)

Almost bought more ENB but actually waited it out .. sold my TCW literally days before the crude pop , no way to know but really annoyed me none the less .


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## fplan (Feb 20, 2014)

missing 2016 jan opportunity..


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## Eder (Feb 16, 2011)

fplan said:


> missing 2016 jan opportunity..


Ahhh....that was our stealth bear market that most people poo poo but the decline was 22%. That puts our bull at only 19 months...party on dudes!

Oh and to be on topic I bought Hollinger & Corel ...both run by slease bag crooks. I did end up golden when the tulip err Linux craze hit though.


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## Robillard (Apr 11, 2009)

My worst investment mistake was letting individual stocks make up even a moderate chunk of my portfolio, particularly Bombardier and EnCana. At least I was disciplined about cutting off my losses after a certain point. Now I keep more of my money invested in index-tracking ETFs.

Another mistake was not holding onto the 30 year GE bonds I picked up on the cheap during the financial crisis. I was too sanguine about interest rates normalizing, and missed out on years of good returns.


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## Dilbert (Nov 20, 2016)

Marrying the wrong woman the first time.


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## spdr1812 (Apr 8, 2016)

Dilbert said:


> Marrying the wrong woman the first time.


Hahaha .. I bought Concordia while driving ( i know ) after i bought and sold a couple times and made some $$ . Unfortunateley it was the last time it seen the light of day .. $36 to .70c


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## peterk (May 16, 2010)

spdr1812 said:


> " Another that I am not quite cured of is buying into weakness when I think the weakness is pretty much all there, but I don't wait long enough." by Alta
> 
> Same here , CVE is a good example for me , when i seen the initial drop , but didn't even wait a day ...





AltaRed said:


> Oh, I wait for months usually, but even that doesn't do it a lot of the time. There are quite a few now, probably tax loss selling that are in downwards slides, e.g. TRI, CCL.B, ITP, ENB to name but a few.


But how do you develop methods of patience, for lack of a better word, or do you wait for some non-trivial amount of upside to happen (10-20%?) before jumping in? Are you talking technical analysis?

I'm trying to think back at both good and bad "bottom timing" trades I've made and the bad ones stick out in my memory way more than the good ones...I'm wondering if that effect would lead us to the conclusion of "I always jump into falling stocks too soon".


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## AltaRed (Jun 8, 2009)

peterk said:


> But how do you develop methods of patience, for lack of a better word, or do you wait for some non-trivial amount of upside to happen (10-20%?) before jumping in? Are you talking technical analysis?
> 
> I'm trying to think back at both good and bad "bottom timing" trades I've made and the bad ones stick out in my memory way more than the good ones...I'm wondering if that effect would lead us to the conclusion of "I always jump into falling stocks too soon".


Mostly by not watching it daily, and more specifically, reminding myself that not having that stock is not important to either my portfolio or my life. It is easy to get 'fixated' because that is when one gets itchy trigger fingers. I don't use TA per se, e.g. moving averages and such. But I always look at a 1 year and 2 year chart, and 52 week lows as one set of criteria. Plus fundamentals like ROE, P/E and P/B. If it means I miss out on a stock...well, yes, it happens. I have less regrets missing a stock entirely than I do buying too soon, and worse, then doubling down. My batting average is simply okay... which is really a Random Walk Down Wall Street.


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## kcowan (Jul 1, 2010)

I have to admit that when I buy a stock, I watch it for a week or two. If it goes up, I feel happy (happy days?) and if it drops, I say I bought it for the long term.


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## Eder (Feb 16, 2011)

kcowan said:


> I have to admit that when I buy a stock, I watch it for a week or two. If it goes up, I feel happy (happy days?) and if it drops, I say I bought it for the long term.


Ain't that the truth...my Rocky Mountain Dealership stock is finally above water after my brain fart buy a few years ago.


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## james4beach (Nov 15, 2012)

I also think that we'll never get the "gambling" out of our systems. The stock market is too addictive.

I set aside money for myself to gamble with. That helps me get it out of my system... 10K in my lowdiv portfolio, very high risk small caps.

My coworker uses an app to speculate in penny stocks, also with a firm cap on capital-at-risk (I hope)

As OLG says: Know your limit, play within it


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## Ponderling (Mar 1, 2013)

My Own Advisor said:


> Too bad so many young folks "have no clue-or interest- in investing at that age". They are certainly missing out on a get wealthy eventually strategy and seem to instead, prefer this you only live once lifestyle mantra.


I have saved systematically since I started working full time after uni. I graduated with and engineering degree, and was working shortly after graduating towards getting my license as a junior at a small firm. I lived in shared accommodation with other co-workers. I bought a used practical compact car. I paid off the modest loan in less than a year, then started saving $100 at a minimum every pay. I was paid every two weeks, and thus was 1990 and I started at $19k/year, though that moved up pretty fast once you started pushing designs out with less than full time supervision.

My regret was being pulled in by bank mutual fund sales people and sold in house products, and not being savvy enough at the time to know there were other alternatives. At least I knew I wanted to buy no load product.

Then Altamira family of funds for a few years. Bank advisor again , then finally I started to buy stable like blue chips about 10 years ago. Indexing just was not as much a force when I was getting started and again, I did not know to look for it at the time.
a


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