Yosemite.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Letting go.

I finally did it. Dumped all the stocks, at a massive loss, of the company that I was in love with forever. Its like letting go of unreciprocated love. Hurts like hell. They say letting go is supposed to make your heart feel lighter. Can't say about the heart but my wallet sure feels much lighter. Total personal loss around 140K USD and change.

I read the monstrous book by fucking Warren Buffet, the greatest investor ever, so they say. The Ingelligent Investor it was called. I felt extremely intelligent after reading the book and many other "great investment" books, much to the chagrin of my wife. At that time I ignored her irritation. Her argument was simple - if we could become rich by reading investment books then everybody in the world would be rich. Ha! What does she know about money, I would think. I followed every piece of advice about "need to focus, not diversify" and "buy low, sell high" etc. etc. Armed and ready with information I began to focus. What better than the company you know in and out about. I focussed so much that at the peak of focussing all my money, and I mean ALL my money, was invested in the one company, that screwed up eventually. The initial going was good. The stock nearly rose ten-fold in the beginning. I felt that I have made the best decision of my life. I was a half-millionaire. Everyone around me begged me sell it off and be happy with what I got. But no. I wanted to be a millionaire. I knew the stock would double and get me to the millinoaire's club. And then the downfall started. The stock dropped and fucking Warren Buffet told me to "buy low, sell high" so I bought more. And it fell further and I bought more. The more it fell the more I bought. My days went by in a dizzy. At one point I was putting in 10K, 20K dollars as the stock continued falling. Months were spent browsing all possible news about the company. I wasted around 2 years immersed in analyzing and re-analyzing the company, thinking this drop is just temporary and dreaming about what will happen when it picks up and then I can sell all these shares at record profits. Work sufferred terribly(what do you expect when all my time is spent on yahoo finance message boards). Lost confidence in my own basic skills, engineering. Its like an elongated period of time that just goes by when you don't remember what exactly you were doing. Analyzing 5 cent ups and downs in the stock price, analyzing volumes, analyzing after hours trading and what not, to fish out information that only I would understand. Information that means nothing in this randomness that they call the stock market.

Finally, I dumped it all. Massive loss. Mental stress took a toll on my health. Its strange you never think that you could be stressed. But stressed as hell I was. Gaand-faat stress. Quit my job. Started a new job. Started working out. Life changed for the better. Its all good now. My new company is doing quite well. The stock is looking great. I wonder if I should buy. Let me analyze the company......

Monday, June 11, 2007

I've gotten myself a blog

Will write something, someday.