I may be a smart man but not a brave one. Stories of missed financial opportunities

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Any prediction on Bay Area Housing costs?

happened last time (2007-2009). some houses doubled at the peak (going from 300K to 750K) then
crashed back down to 350K. other houses continued their steady climb. the stats say that many houses
in the bay area haven't recovered from their high water mark. others have gone way beyond.

I think they will continue climbing but slowly until there's a correction. many keep their high prices
and the rest fall away. has to do with the quality, age, desirability of the house. there are houses
I won't drive-by let alone look at or, horrors, rent/buy - namely any house older than 1972.

I have a very good friend with a tiny house and a big family. he extended his house and
added a second floor. he tripled the footage, using built-in equity as a loan for the
re-construction, and he became his own general contractor.

he farmed out what he couldn't do (concrete pours, additional framing, etc) but he, himself,
did the floors, the walls, the roof, the electricals, the (sunk in, LED, floods, etc) lighting.
not to mention the initial demolition, final paint, etc. he had advice (but not labor) from
his BIL who is a high-end contractor himself. the labor savings, even with occasional
help, was the major savings and it did take longer than normal. you can imagine what
labor costs in the hottest housing market in the US are.

not bad for a high tech marketing guy and he has other God-given skills that I consider
awesome. I told him he has a Plan B in case the silicon valley high tech sector
crashes. my idea of house renovation is replacing burned out lamps.

so yes, housing is just one of many ways to build wealth, and like stocks - can
be tricky in terms of what you pick and when you get in and when you get out.

I, myself, am not comfortable with a single investment (like a house) and I love
the 500K profit exclusion (Thank you President Clinton) for each house -
you can pocket 1 million with NO taxes in about 10 years with two houses.
from personal experience (of others I am friends with) and in my opinion
only in blue states. Relatives in NY tell me the same.

to answer your question directly, look at Apple's new HQ. buy a house nearby
and renovate it like its the holy grail, and your 6 figure tax free retirement
fund all rolled into one. If you think million dollar houses are expensive, the
bay area has just rendered it the price of entry.
 
happened last time (2007-2009). some houses doubled at the peak (going from 300K to 750K) then
crashed back down to 350K. other houses continued their steady climb. the stats say that many houses
in the bay area haven't recovered from their high water mark. others have gone way beyond.

I think they will continue climbing but slowly until there's a correction. many keep their high prices
and the rest fall away. has to do with the quality, age, desirability of the house. there are houses
I won't drive-by let alone look at or, horrors, rent/buy - namely any house older than 1972.

I have a very good friend with a tiny house and a big family. he extended his house and
added a second floor. he tripled the footage, using built-in equity as a loan for the
re-construction, and he became his own general contractor.

he farmed out what he couldn't do (concrete pours, additional framing, etc) but he, himself,
did the floors, the walls, the roof, the electricals, the (sunk in, LED, floods, etc) lighting.
not to mention the initial demolition, final paint, etc. he had advice (but not labor) from
his BIL who is a high-end contractor himself. the labor savings, even with occasional
help, was the major savings and it did take longer than normal. you can imagine what
labor costs in the hottest housing market in the US are.

not bad for a high tech marketing guy and he has other God-given skills that I consider
awesome. I told him he has a Plan B in case the silicon valley high tech sector
crashes. my idea of house renovation is replacing burned out lamps.

so yes, housing is just one of many ways to build wealth, and like stocks - can
be tricky in terms of what you pick and when you get in and when you get out.

I, myself, am not comfortable with a single investment (like a house) and I love
the 500K profit exclusion (Thank you President Clinton) for each house -
you can pocket 1 million with NO taxes in about 10 years with two houses.
from personal experience (of others I am friends with) and in my opinion
only in blue states. Relatives in NY tell me the same.

to answer your question directly, look at Apple's new HQ. buy a house nearby
and renovate it like its the holy grail, and your 6 figure tax free retirement
fund all rolled into one. If you think million dollar houses are expensive, the
bay area has just rendered it the price of entry.

Though I agree with most of your points. I disagree that blue states are somehow more desirable for RE investments, due to being blue. I see it more as, because of circumstances, they've been desirable investments, despite being blue. My sister used to work for the largest RE property mgmt firm in NYC, CBRE. The people she worked for, who are some of the most respected, and knowledgeable people in the country when it comes to RE investments. None of them owned a home in NY, or any RE in NY.The reason being, blue states are notoriously biased against property owners. The landlord tenant laws heavily favor the tenant in disputes. Evictions, even for non-payment is a slow, tedious, and expensive process. The overhead can increase at the same rate, or quicker than the equity building on the property. In fact, in NYC, if you have a mortgage on a property, it's impossible to even break even on rental income and overhead unless you cook the books and under report rental income.

The problem with RE investment in blue states, is that soon as your name is on a deed. The state treats you like their personal ATM machine. Take for example, the cost of water in NYC, it costs 10x as much as water in Vegas, a desert. Yet, when my parents first immigrated to NYC in the early 80s, water was covered in property taxes. I grew up in NYC, my parents profited from RE investments in NYC (bought and sold over 50 properties from 1984-2008). Now the reason NYC can get away with gouging property owners in ever more creative ways, and still have consistent growth in value, and development is because of the constant influx of out of state investments. That there is the key, a constant flow of out of state money, especially investments from abroad. Blue states tend to consistently pull lots of investments from abroad due to large immigrant communities.

Now as immigrant communities reach multiple generations, and English proficiency in immigrant communities increase past a certain threshold. Second, third, fourth generation Immigrants become more comfortable venturing outside their communities, and investing in more business friendly states. I don't believe those communities will continue to pull in the kind of foreign investments they have. Just take a look at blue states with the highest taxes, NY, CA, IL, all have been showing year after year of net population losses. It's safe to say most population lost are people with the savings to relocate, and begin anew. These blue states are losing billions in taxable income every year. Which they're going to make up the losses from by squeezing property owners even more.
 
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interesting but different viewpoints. Rentals are BIG problems in the blue states in the big cities for a different reason
called rent control. if you have ever lived in one of these cities you face (1980s NYC) 300 for rent-controlled
Village Apartment if you find one - not possible if newly transplanted, or 3500 upper east side (singles population).
Seinfeld deals with some of this. there's an entire Underground business with following the obits and pre-bribes
to supers for the former.

second I find it interesting that your parents bought/sold 50 properties in the largest city of a blue state. you indirectly
confirmed my conjecture. I doubt this was doable in a red state like Nebraska or Kansas - even though I love Omaha and Lenexa.

you're probably right about the property laws but the reverse is true. Since Prop 13, California has dumbed down its
educational K-12 system so it battles the bottom 10 states for supremacy. NY on the other hand, again back in the
day, had 3 public high schools in the US top 10. You may even have attended Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvesant, or Bronx HS Science.

if there are population losses, it's from the upper middle classes buying their 6 figure houses in the suburbs. In SF and LA, there
are now Asian RE brokers speaking Mandarin (mainland Chinese), Cantonese (Hong Kong folks), Korean, and Vietnamese.
there are stories of cash offers of 250K over appraisal values. teardown and gound-up McMansions (two and three stories) in the middle
of Los Altos (already million dollar minimums). so net population losses are an independent variable and can be used on
both sides of the revenue tax base advocates. Besides, taxes in different areas go up when revenues in other areas go down.

But to get to my original points, Housing (as in ownership, not rental or speculation (LTD master partnerships or REITs are better))
is, again a good investment, based on my knowledge of friends and family that have done this - and I am not using third party anecdotes
to prove a different point. NYC and SF are my reference points. las Vegas could be the challenging winner and Houston
seems to be on the verge of evilly tripling pre-Harvey house prices.

and I did not have the 20K in the 1960s for that wonderful tenement that sold for 7 figures. so my holy grail is stocks.
 
China has just banned the use of Bitcoins. it is alleged that 40% of the newly minted millionaires are
looking to take their moolah and move to the gold ole US of A (as did a Chinese billionaire recently
seeking "political" asylum).

it was a China-wide epiphany to look into what a Bitcoin was and how to use that to move
money out of china (they have laws against repatriating money out of china and hundreds
of businesses that help you do so).

about 4 years some of my saner friends looked into building generators powered by winds
in Hawaii of all places to power Nvidia/AMD video cards with their thousands of CPUs
to generate bitcoins. the point was that ordinary AC power companies charged more
for power than computers could generate bitcoin cash.

that china statement dropped the value of bitcoins but it will come back - are there any 3x bull
Bitcoin ETFs?
 
interesting but different viewpoints. Rentals are BIG problems in the blue states in the big cities for a different reason
called rent control. if you have ever lived in one of these cities you face (1980s NYC) 300 for rent-controlled
Village Apartment if you find one - not possible if newly transplanted, or 3500 upper east side (singles population).
Seinfeld deals with some of this. there's an entire Underground business with following the obits and pre-bribes
to supers for the former.

second I find it interesting that your parents bought/sold 50 properties in the largest city of a blue state. you indirectly
confirmed my conjecture. I doubt this was doable in a red state like Nebraska or Kansas - even though I love Omaha and Lenexa.

you're probably right about the property laws but the reverse is true. Since Prop 13, California has dumbed down its
educational K-12 system so it battles the bottom 10 states for supremacy. NY on the other hand, again back in the
day, had 3 public high schools in the US top 10. You may even have attended Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvesant, or Bronx HS Science.

if there are population losses, it's from the upper middle classes buying their 6 figure houses in the suburbs. In SF and LA, there
are now Asian RE brokers speaking Mandarin (mainland Chinese), Cantonese (Hong Kong folks), Korean, and Vietnamese.
there are stories of cash offers of 250K over appraisal values. teardown and gound-up McMansions (two and three stories) in the middle
of Los Altos (already million dollar minimums). so net population losses are an independent variable and can be used on
both sides of the revenue tax base advocates. Besides, taxes in different areas go up when revenues in other areas go down.

But to get to my original points, Housing (as in ownership, not rental or speculation (LTD master partnerships or REITs are better))
is, again a good investment, based on my knowledge of friends and family that have done this - and I am not using third party anecdotes
to prove a different point. NYC and SF are my reference points. las Vegas could be the challenging winner and Houston
seems to be on the verge of evilly tripling pre-Harvey house prices.

and I did not have the 20K in the 1960s for that wonderful tenement that sold for 7 figures. so my holy grail is stocks.

If you saw my first post in the thread, you'd see I actually own a rent controlled/stabilized unit in NYC. So I know everything worth knowing about them. I worked in property mgmt there for 10 years, so I have experienced with all sorts of rentals in NYC. Overhead costs for property ownership in NYC now is universally high. Most property owners risk it, by cooking their books to break even.

I also mentioned my parents got into NYC property investing early on, before over regulation, and high costs of ownership. Nowadays, the average closing time in NYC is 2-3 months. In Nevada, we often close in under a week.

I'm actually a Bronx science graduate. My personal opinion is that these specialized HS, actually hurt the odds of immigrant students when it comes to college acceptance. The majority of immigrants in my graduating class was forced to attend City or State Colleges as a result.

The proliferation of foreign language speaking RE brokers proves my point that these communities are specifically catering to those early generation immigrants uncomfortable with English, and thus uncomfortable investing outside of immigrant communities. This will change eventually, and those communities may be taken over by a new immigrant group. It happened in NYC as little Italy got chipped away more and more by Chinatown, and although most people don't realize, Chinatown was originally developed by Cantonese speaking immigrants, and they have been replaced by immigrants from various parts of mainland China in recent times. The Fugenese, and Wen Zhou Chinese immigrants have been aggressively displacing all other Asian communities in NYC for the past 10-15 years. Most people cannot see the change. But Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and Korean communities in NYC have shrunk considerably in that time, in fact it's rare to even meet a Taiwanese, or Vietnamese NYC resident nowadays . I suspect the same has been happening with the Hispanic communities.

The net population losses I'm talking about are out of the state, not out of metro areas into suburban areas. The latest census data I could find was for 2014, but they show the following state in order as having the largest percentage of in migration from other states, as follows: North Dakota, Nevada, South Carolina, Colorado, Florida, Arizona, and Texas. None are blue states except for Colorado. Blue states cannot sustain net population losses of high income earners forever. They know this, so it's easy to see why they universally support forming sanctuary cities. They need the foreign cash to keep flowing, because they're growing more and more dependent on it.
 
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it was a China-wide epiphany to look into what a Bitcoin was and how to use that to move
money out of china (they have laws against repatriating money out of china and hundreds
of businesses that help you do so).

This is true, when I first moved to Vegas, the housing market had been decimated, and most properties were selling for 1/3rd replacement cost. The Chinese government had already begun limiting how much cash their citizens could bring to the USA each month. With housing values so low, many Chinese people were buying up Vegas properties because even with the limits in place, they could have a few family members bring in the max, and purchase a house.
 
Back in 1997 a good friend of mine, with no college degree, asked me to go into business with him. This is one of those friends who comes up with business ideas on the fly and is a wheeler/dealer. The amount was $400, which I didn't have, had a kid on the way, and was joining the military. For some odd reason I had a feeling about this business idea of his, it was opening a wholesale car sale locator (something like that, but there wasn't any examples back then). Years later I was at a dealership shopping around and I saw this friend. He came up, said hi, looked to the sales man I was dealing with and said "I'll take this Subaru WRX (new) for 18.5K. He went, paid, and drove off in 10 minutes.

I later found out his business had exploded to 2 stores and was basically CarMax before CarMax existed. I also found out he lives in a million dollar home in Castle Rock, Colorado with an Olympic size indoor pool. Man doesn't that $400 sound good now!
 
fast and slow closing is somewhat related to whether you need a lawyer (I think you do in NY - and no lawyer needed in CA)
CA used to close houses in about 4 weeks at the fastest. a great broker in Ca tells me the speed is directly
related to government rules.

Immigrant kids in the big 3 suffer from one thing you probably don't unless you're 1st/2nd gen immigrant:
their parents don't speak English at the college level. therefore the kids, while colloquially fluent, can't do
the English SATs like the math. second, they are rarely into the niceties of Ivy league requirements
(less total SAT scores but looking for HS class presidents, captain of sports teams, etc). the other side
is that lots of IVY leaguers come from the prep schools, are national merit "scholars", speak several languages,
have wealthier parents, etc Immigrant kids are better served in CUNY where they are more the mainstream
and the tuition is about 250K less. Plus CUNY commuters versus trust fund condos.

As a parent, competing with similarly skilled kids is far better than competing with 4th gen legacy Columbia
kids who ski in Europe during winter breaks, and scuba dive during spring break. and join their fathers
law firms after Columbia and Yale Law.

Chinese limitation on cash is a joke. My friends in HK tell me there's a steady stream of cars going to Macau
with trunks loaded with Chinese cash. How shall I say it, but it's "easier" moving cash through Macau than
HK. and Macau's money is useless outside macau and with macau's larger than Vegas gambling it
is a fat pipe of money being laundered into US/HK dollars.

SF gets more than its fair share of cash offers for houses in the million dollar class - so there are
ways (Hogan's Heroes) to move massive amounts electronically. on this side of the pond
(apologies to the Brits) there are lawyers who help Chinese millionaires get their residence
visas for investing 500K in a new business. they set one up for 6 months, pull the money out and
voila - free residence in the US. and ocassionally use the purchase of a house against the 500K bogey.

I think we agree on most points and differ in degree. your property is probably worth a million bucks.
Back in the day, you would have used a lawyer from Prince st. or Mulberry st. however, no matter
how NYC governments help/screw you, the price of NYC RE is never going down. you may not
have great cash flow but you are still a millionaire, at least on paper.

Probably another reason why I like the liquidity of stocks. with limits set or expiration dates.
you can get out as fast as you want to.
 
I don't see Coca-Cola mentioned. We all missed this one. 1919 IPO $40/share is now worth about $345k.

My personal missed opportunity was not getting out soon enough when the tech boom went bust overnight. On the front end I started with $350k I netted from AirTouch employees stock option grants. I paid $200k off the top in taxes. I found a good broker and 2 years later I was at $1.3 on paper. When the shit hit the fan I was at $250k when all was said and done.

The lesson I learned was - don't trust large institutional holders of stocks. They would have a buy rating on a stock right until they dumped it a market close. In the morning the company would be bankrupt, their stock at $0. The next day it wouldn't be listed.
 
https://a.msn.com/r/2/AAsfumb?m=en-us
Back in 1997 a good friend of mine, with no college degree, asked me to go into business with him. This is one of those friends who comes up with business ideas on the fly and is a wheeler/dealer. The amount was $400, which I didn't have, had a kid on the way, and was joining the military. For some odd reason I had a feeling about this business idea of his, it was opening a wholesale car sale locator (something like that, but there wasn't any examples back then). Years later I was at a dealership shopping around and I saw this friend. He came up, said hi, looked to the sales man I was dealing with and said "I'll take this Subaru WRX (new) for 18.5K. He went, paid, and drove off in 10 minutes.

I later found out his business had exploded to 2 stores and was basically CarMax before CarMax existed. I also found out he lives in a million dollar home in Castle Rock, Colorado with an Olympic size indoor pool. Man doesn't that $400 sound good now!

well, I've turned down lots of offers knowing full well they would be worth lots of $$$. the question is
whether you will do something with the next opportunity.

I help a lot of folks I used to work with. they have patents and are smart. they lack the initiative to do the whole tortilla.
things like business plans, sales and marketing, etc. they seem to read all about the billionaire-creating IPOs
and think they'll be the next Zuckerberg. all by sitting next to the door and ready to open it for VCs with cash
loosely held in either hand.

one person who was a millionaire in the 1970s (like being worth 100 million today) told me
success is where luck meets preparation. you have no control over luck but you'd better be prepared.

my personal funny story is with a co-worker who wanted to be rich, famous, good-looking, etc. we worked
across the street from the Sofitel hotel in Redwood Shores. as we walked to the hotel for lunch we
saw a baby blue V12 Benz two-seater running with the keys in it. I said to my co-worker, here's your
chance to pitch your plan to Larry (Ellison - you know the billionaire CEO of Oracle) if he's in the head
and captive during his potty break. we had about 15 seconds before we reached the restrooms.

he would have had about 15 seconds to pitch his grand scheme. and who knows. Scott (McNealy)
allegedly sold Sun Microsystems to Larry in about 10 seconds in a round of golf.

Unfortunately the restroom was empty but was he prepared. there's the formal dining room
and the café - being working stiffs we could only afford the café. larry was there with someone
but that's a story for another time.

be prepared.

Yowza
 
I don't see Coca-Cola mentioned. We all missed this one. 1919 IPO $40/share is now worth about $345k.

My personal missed opportunity was not getting out soon enough when the tech boom went bust overnight. On the front end I started with $350k I netted from AirTouch employees stock option grants. I paid $200k off the top in taxes. I found a good broker and 2 years later I was at $1.3 on paper. When the shit hit the fan I was at $250k when all was said and done.

The lesson I learned was - don't trust large institutional holders of stocks. They would have a buy rating on a stock right until they dumped it a market close. In the morning the company would be bankrupt, their stock at $0. The next day it wouldn't be listed.

what stock was this?

But today there are ways to mitigate any downsides. Puts. inverse vehicles. It would be prudent
to look into any and all such products in case there's a correction/crash.
 
fast and slow closing is somewhat related to whether you need a lawyer (I think you do in NY - and no lawyer needed in CA)
CA used to close houses in about 4 weeks at the fastest. a great broker in Ca tells me the speed is directly
related to government rules.

Chinese limitation on cash is a joke. My friends in HK tell me there's a steady stream of cars going to Macau
with trunks loaded with Chinese cash. How shall I say it, but it's "easier" moving cash through Macau than
HK. and Macau's money is useless outside macau and with macau's larger than Vegas gambling it
is a fat pipe of money being laundered into US/HK dollars.

SF gets more than its fair share of cash offers for houses in the million dollar class - so there are
ways (Hogan's Heroes) to move massive amounts electronically. on this side of the pond
(apologies to the Brits) there are lawyers who help Chinese millionaires get their residence
visas for investing 500K in a new business. they set one up for 6 months, pull the money out and
voila - free residence in the US. and ocassionally use the purchase of a house against the 500K bogey.

I think we agree on most points and differ in degree. your property is probably worth a million bucks.
Back in the day, you would have used a lawyer from Prince st. or Mulberry st. however, no matter
how NYC governments help/screw you, the price of NYC RE is never going down. you may not
have great cash flow but you are still a millionaire, at least on paper.

Probably another reason why I like the liquidity of stocks. with limits set or expiration dates.
you can get out as fast as you want to.

You're completely correct on legal requirements and closing NYC RE.That was one of my points, government regulation hurting the investor.

The legal limitations on Chinese cash are there. Regardless of how creative the Chinese can be in getting around them. As I mentioned, Vegas was popular to Chinese investors after the housing crash because they could move relatively little money and buy property almost monthly. They could easily explain away why they were moving that cash as them wanting to simply gamble.

I've been detached from NYC RE somewhere for 5 years now. But I hear from friends still involved that a major issue right now is that many Chinese buyers want to buy million+ dollar homes all cash, and pay a large portion under table. Sellers are often stuck trying to figure out how they're going to explain away selling their home for less than they owe with such large portions under table. I've heard stories of seller's carrying cash counting machines in carry on luggage into their lawyer's office for closing, and their lawyers staying out of the room until asked to come in.

NYC RE has historically beaten all estimates, I've lived there long enough to know that. But from what I've seen, it did so primarily by attracting foreign investment. Asian immigrants for the most part all look the same, and most people don't realize it when one group of asian immigrants displaces another. Yet I've seen just that happen multiple times in the 28 years I lived there. The Fu Zhou, and Wen Zhou Chinese immigrants are the ones currently bringing in the big investments to NYC asian communities as wealthy first generation immigrants. They've successfully displaced the asian immigrants who developed Chinatown, Flushing, Elmhurst etc..I simply don't see who's going to displace them right now. Because eventually they'll look to more business friendly states to do business, and move their assets there, as did the later generation immigrants they've displaced. If I were to hazard a guess today, I'd say maybe Indians, or Uzbekistanians as they're the two economies with economies poised for big growth thanks to wild wild west lack of business regulations.

Anyway, being a millionaire who lives paycheck to paycheck thanks for property ownership overhead, who's wife has to work 6 days a week to provide any sort of savings. What a time to be alive. But as it stands, long as my property is occupied by a rent controlled/stabilized tenant it's worth $150k max. Yes it's value will increase to market value if the tenant willingly leaves, or passes away.
 
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Actually there will be no end to Mainlanders leaving China with millions. there are restrictions even in china regarding
RE speculation (the Chinese hiccup in 2015 took the American stock market down with it) and with all the rules that change
they are afraid of keeping their gains intact.

Second, they have a national test to see who gets into their colleges. Very similar to the old useless Imperial Exams.
guess what - no college for most. even if you quality they charge for school and NO guarantees of jobs on graduation.

then there are the US colleges doing recruitment in HK and China. They pay full rides. and the sad part is that
there are a number of Chinese students killed in the US. they worry like nobody's business.

All of which points to the US being a long-term immigration destination. for self, one's money, and one's children
and they find out computer science degreed graduates get multiple job offers and often 100K+.

I have a good friend whose Mother is china-first. He tells her there are no examples of US citizens giving up their
American rights to go live in China. Rather the opposite is true.

however, if given a chance to breathe, there are ways to get around whatever blocks your way. I was once taught that
anger by itself is useless (like the Imperial exams and "I could have been a contender" marlon in Streetcar Named Desire)
but channeling it, using it as a driving force, to great goals.
 
And that's where we disagree, I've seen too many once dominant immigrant groups displaced during my time in NYC. I believe the influx of wealthy mainland Chinese immigrants to the US will slow to a trickle in the next 10-20 years. They've already slowed considerably in just the past 5 years.

RE values have been on an unsustainable rush since the housing crisis, fueled by foreign investment. Any pullback of foreign investment is going to create a market correction situation. Now I'm not saying I think blue states are headed for another housing bubble. But I am saying their high median prices are bound to plateau soon. Then buyers will eventually see it for what it is, over inflated prices, starting at the high end properties,and that will trickle down to lower priced properties.

Then you've got to consider with these extremely high median home prices. Young adults will have to forgo equity and rent longer before they can even afford a home. Unless they, like me make the conscious decision to simply pickup, leave, and settle somewhere affordable. For the one's who can't do that. They will start migrating in state to more affordable areas. These former ghettos are going to be the areas with the best investment potential.
 
Well heres my story: circa 83/85 I was an auto mechanic, single with $10,000. in the bank. My sister worked for Merrill Lynch and suggested I buy some stocks. Over the next 3 yrs I bought McDonald's, Microsoft, Nike, Idec Pharmaceutical and Intel, $30,000 total investment.........I moved on and pretty much just let them sit .......2016: value was almost $25000,00. Funny my only loss was Intel ....Call BS if you want it's all the truth .....
 
In the mid 70's, I worked for M.I.T.S. in Albuquerque. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were running Microsoft out of a room at the Sundowner Motel. Our boss, Ed Roberts, was afraid to buy Gates' stolen MS-DOS code (and was also afraid of going to jail for mail fraud, having promised Altair 8080 buyers an operating system).. He had nearly ended up in court for similar reasons on a really bad 4 function generator that never came near its advertised specs. My job, since my bench was closest to the door, was to head off Gates when he came in and find some bullshit reason that Roberts wasn't there even though his car was in the parking lot.. Gates' and Allen's families had cut them off and Gates was going to have to sell his Porsche to cover their expenses. He offered me 1/5 of the company for $5000 and I told him where he could stick it (mostly because he was a rotten, spoiled, arrogant little punk). I didn't have the money but if I could have seen the future, I would have robbed a bank.

I could certainly use an extra 15 billion dollars today.

My father did almost exactly the same thing with Edwin Land when he was starting up Polaroid.
 
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I forgot about Bitcoin. I’ve known about Bitcoin for some years now, but originally dismissed the idea. Anyway, I finally bought some and some Ethereum and Litecoin last April. Just playing around, really, but I made 400% in three months.
 
I was given the chance to take a silver Aston Marton DB6 off a guys hands for $35,000 who had electrical issues in '95. They're going for about 1/2 a million now.
 
If you had bought Apple stock everytime they came out with a new product, instead of buying that product, you would be sitting on a beach with an umbrella in your drink.

My then college freshman son at UCSD in 2003 told me everyone on campus wanted a newly introduced MP3 player that was sweeping college campuses. I looked into the company and took 3 months to make an initial investment - by which time the stock had doubled from $40 to $80. Luckily, the stock split 2:1 in 2005, and again 7:1 in 2014. My father-in-law had also bought the same stock in the 90's for all his grandkids in their college funds that vested over to them when they turned 18.

I also bought more Apple stock when the iPhone came out (do you remember that >50% of the "tech" pundits of the time said that the iphone was a "doomed experiment", Jobs' big blunder, and that "Nokia, Motorola, and Blackberry have nothing to worry about"?).

The best thing that ever happened to me was after having worked for 13 years with my medical school / university teaching and seeing patients, we had a falling out and I was let go in early 2012. I took everything that I had amassed in a 403B account (with contributions and company matching) with TIAA-CREF (decent returns using essentially stock index funds) and moved that modest 6 figure over to my IRA. It was then that I made additional purchases of AAPL, COST, BA, and later FB and NFLX. Apple had introduced their iPhone 5 series in 2012 and 5S 2013 but it was easy to see the larger Samsung Galaxy phones were highly accepted and that led to Apple's introduction of the larger iPhone 6 in 2014. Of course, that led to huge gains in AAPL stock and its 7:1 split in June 2014.

My major regrets here are being so stuck on NOT buying competitor stocks - mainly Google (didn't like their ad revenue platform - they don't "make" anything, plus their genesis of Android OS), Samsung (direct main competitor of AAPL, plus very, IMO, screwed up Korean family owned (Chaebol) business dynamics - doesn't mean they didn't make huge winning strides in memory chip and OLED display development and eventual domination), Facebook (who wants social media, what can people really do with it, and of course, how the heck do you monetize that?), and others.

Of course, for every Google there was AOL, Yahoo, Alta Vista, even MSN, for every Facebook, there was MySpace, Twitter, and others, for every AAPL there was HP, COMPAQ, Dell, IBM, Lenovo, etc.

Thinking you have to hit a home run to succeed in investing in stock is what causes this... a successful investment strategy does not require you to hit home runs, nor does it require bravery. It takes a commitment to actually go to the plate NOW and swing the bat and put things in play, and keep doing that. And, doing that consistently - even if all you ever hit is singles - will win the game.

Here's some of Warren Buffet's words of wisdom: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/th...-talked-about-index-fund-investing-2017-04-28

One that hit home for me recently was #2 - the perfect way to get in the game and start hitting singles w/o having to work up your nerve.

John

Excellent advice!!

During the last meltdown, Apple was $99. It went up to $600 and then split 10 to 1. There are lots of others I looked at. I don't really think about it because I am happy where I am at and with what I have.

Apple split 7:1 in June 2014. Apple closed at $645 on that Friday and reopened at $92 the following Monday. It dropped back into the 90's a number of times in 2016 and those have been buying opportunities for those who were interested.
 
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