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02/08/2004 Entry: "It's only money"
There's a saying among investors, "Don't analyze your portfolio daily, it will only drive you nuts." Yeah. I haven't looked at my stock portfolio much recently. It was rather heavily tech-centric, and I haven't contributed much to it in a while for obvious reasons. I was happy to find out that it wasn't a total loss (it used to be), but it's not that great either. I won't discuss how much I have or what, but I was a bit happy to find out that it had a some money in it. Not NEARLY what it used to be, and that can be depressing. Let's just say it's less than 8% of the value it was at its peak. At a party recently, I asked a friend, "Why aren't we rich?" and he said the most depressing thing. "I know the exact date I made the mistake. It was December 31st, 1999. I was at a phone booth, considering cashing what I had and rolling it over to real estate. I decided to hold. Right now, I would have been worth $1.8 million." The dot.com bubble burst for him, too, and then he got laid off, and a lot of his investments were stock grants from his previous employer. I figured out what I would have been worth had I sold it all at the same time, and which it's no $1.8 million, I would have not been worrying about money right now, I'll tell you that. I am glad I cashed in when I did, I have a nice house because of that, so I don't feel this sucking loss, but more of a, "Well, crap!" sort of feeling. It's only money, after all.
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