How about one I ALMOST made but escaped by the skin of my teeth? :) When I started working
at BIO 5 years ago I just put in payroll deduction for the company stock and have been
just letting it build up, not paying all that much attention. During that time it has gone
from around $35 to $88 or so, so I was getting a great return on my $$$ esp. since I get a
15% discount. BUT I also knew I was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay overloaded on that one stock and
underinvested otherwise. So I sold off 3/4 of them and invested otherwise, paid off my car
a year early, etc. That was mid-January. This week they dropped to $67!! (Back up to
around $73 or so.) I got my $$$ just in time!! :) I still have some and am pretty
confident they will eventually go back up; but I sure came close to losing a bundle! :)
Whew!

Last edited on: 02-28-2007 12:34 am

Anyone have anything else to add here???

I bought AMD at almost $40 and sold it under $15. I bought DYN at $5.18 and sold it at
$5.43 because I didn't like their quarter. As of yesterday it was well over $8/share. :o(

I bought CMGI at $100. Sold at $108. The stock gapped up and took off. I don't remember if
that was the year it hit $200 or $300, but what's the difference. I initially bought it to
hold until $200, but I didn't have enough disipline.

I can't figure out how MSFT is going to make any money with vista if AOL is offering free
upgrades.

Same thing happened to me Jim, except I waited it out. As soon as Microsoft hit $27.50 I
was out of it. I've never been tempted to go back. It pays a nice dividend but it's one
snore of a stock. I just feel bad for those poor people who bought in after the Vista
launch and then watched the stock go down 8 days in a row. It's one of the most boring
tech stocks I've ever owned. When investors bid it up over 31 I was like, "No, don't do
it, it's going to take three years to get back to that price." Good stock for covered
calls though.

I bought Microsoft in January 2006at $27 because X-Box had sold well Vista (and Office
for Vista) was going to push the stock up much higher. That was my thesis. Then at the end
of April they announced Vista would be delayed and the stock dropped 11% overnight. I held
on waiting for a bounce that never came and six weeks later finally cashed out at $21.75.
On June 12. The exact day of the 52-week low. Within hours of me bailing out, Microsoft
started upward, gaining 38% by mid-November.

"Nobody ever made a dime by panicking" -JC. What was I thinking? Microsoft has never
released a system upgrade on time since DOS 2.0. It wasn't going to go to zero. I should
have known it would be OK with a little more time and I was getting paid a dividend to
wait. "Doh!" -HS.

This morning when I jumped on: "Stockpickr's System Trades of the Day include triggers
this morning on Wynn Resorts"

Just kidding.

Maybe those algo's need a lil' work Jimbo?

While SBUX is thrown to the wind, I turned down many shares upon their opening of their
first store in Manhattan a decade ago, so I'd call it a mistake on my part. Whether it is
a good investment now is another matter. SBUX doesn't taste as good as Dunkin Donuts (at
least according to every blind taste test I have ever heard of), but SBUX doesn't sell
coffee--it sells an image. That explains why people won't hang out in a Dunkin' Donuts
with a dozen psych patients, but will wait in line for a $4 cup of SBUX's mediocre coffee.
It is about image. Pepsi tastes better than Coke (Yep, so much so that Coke tried "New
Coke"in the 1980s, which tasted remarkably like Pepsi!) What's more, "New Coke" clobbered
Regular Coke in every blind taste test ever done. But, the name "Coca Cola" means much,
much more than the beverage it offers.
The bigger question is where will SBUX grow? Europe has millions of "high class" coffee
joints. Can you imagine SBUX in Italy? That is a riot--they'd laugh it out of the country.
That leaves Asia, with millions of tea houses. Sorry, but SBUX capitalized on America
being unsophisticated, but I doubt can make it elsewhere, at least to a relevant extent.

Not to sound arrogant, as I have spent the majority of my trading years being bad as
opposed to competent, but my worst trading mistakes were profitabloe ones.

- 1998: I made a killing on my first options trade. Put most of my personal account on a
single put position and it went from $1.50 to $6 per contract in 2 days. It was all dumb
luck, but it took years of losing lots of money on options until i realized that.

-1999: When internet stocks were all the rage, a smart trader friend emailed me pointing
out they were about to finish decoding the human genome, at which pt genetics stocks would
be in. His argument made sense, but knowing nothing about biotech i ran a symbol search
for any stocks with the word "gene" in their name and bought the first 10 stocks that
popped up. A few weeks later they decode the genome and bam, my portfolio is up 100% so i
sell it all. Six months later the stocks in that portfolio were at least 10 times higher,
as in one stock that I bought at 3.50 and sold at 8 eventualy got as high as 120. Biotechs
were the last sector to top out as the bubble burst, so they rallied the hardest.