Stock Market and the Stoski: A Cautionary Tale
I had shares in a company called Bluescope Steel for a few years when I was younger. It's on the Australian Stock Exchange. It’s kind of a big deal here. One day, I had a feeling that the price would tank. It was, at the time, $6.something, and I’d bought at $2.something. With such a jump since purchase, I thought that I'd take my tidy profit and split, which I did, ploughing the money into SYD - a local airport company.
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A few days later, the price tanks hard. Went down to 0.55 or some such. Needless to say, I'm feeling really good about myself. I predicted the market at the optimum time and maximized my growth before a spill. SYD was even climbing already. Happy days!
Cut to today. Bluescope is at 16.11. I could have increased my ownership of a dividend-paying bluechip by 12x, and I squandered it for some stupid airport shares.
SYD is okay, I guess, but no-where near where Bluescope is. The lesson? Don’t leave the job half done. If life hands you the potential to make tens of thousands of dollars, grab that shit and don’t let go. Also don’t get halfway through and, smugly reward yourself for being so smart, and spend tens of thousands of dollars, and the next 10 years of your life, trying to replicate that fluke. But that was just my experience.