If I had ten cents for every dollar I lost in the stock market when the dotcom bubble popped, I’d have enough to eat lunch for a year …

It was brutal, lemmetellya …

After being hooked by online stock trading, it became a big game … until things went south.

I stuck doggedly to my beloved high-tech and ecommerce dogs. I wasn’t following any sound investment advice, I was only hoping (in vain) that each stock was going through a correction. I didn’t want to sell and lock in the losses. After all, I had convinced myself that these were quality companies.

Ha!

Stupid me. If had been working with an investment adviser of some sort, I wouldn’t have ridden so many into the ground. But after watching a handful of my early picks fly high, I got stupid. When the going got ugly, it got really ugly.

It’s the old shoulda, coulda, woulda … but in reverse.

If there’s one thing I gained from the experience of living sans investment advice, it’s the knowledge to know that many of the ‘when to buy and when to sell’ decisions are best made by the folks that have the time, experience, and emotional disconnection to know when the time is right.

I get a laugh when I look at my pitiful monthly brokerage statements these days … an ironic and expensive laugh, that is, as I witness mysterious new companies rising out of the ashes of those crash ‘n burn high-tech stocks.

[tags]investment advice, online stock trading[/tags]