I often look back on the dot com boom with disappointment but I have taken it in stride. I sometimes like to play things fast and loose and this can be both a positive and a negative. I started investing my money when I was twelve years old. This was around 1991. I lived for it. The thought of making money thrilled me. And it played to my strengths. Research and analysis is my strong point.



Back then money meant everything to me. I had dreams of becoming a billionaire. At that time I had saved up a few thousand dollars and was just putting it in various stocks via Charles Schwab. I had no idea what I was doing but it was fun as hell. And I was making a profit too (albeit a small one). Over time I became more and more confident. Hubris finally took over. I told my parents that I wanted to take my college fund (which was about $45,000 at the time) and invest it in stocks of my choosing. I think that this was around 1996 -- around the time of the inception of the dot com boom. I would take all of this money and put it in a single stock. It became a compulsive thing. I would change stocks a week later. And the following week I would choose a different stock. As so on and so forth. Of course, I would always chose technology stocks and so I did remarkably well. I managed to do this over and over again and my profits on paper multiplied. I was a high roller and I had free reign. I can’t remember all the stocks that I chose because there were so many. At my height, I had about $555,000 dollars in stock. But I wanted much more. I was greedy as hell.



Then came the bust. In the Fall of 2001, I was hit hard. Over a period of two or three months, my earnings fell to approximately $100,000. You would think that I would have developed a gambling problem by then and have lost it all. But I didn’t develop one because I don’t have a addictive personality. So I just quit cold turkey. Fortunately, I still managed to make a profit. Not a great one ... just a good one.



Ever since then, my style of investing has been conservative, to put it lightly. I was so stung by the whole thing that I didn’t even consider investing until about a year ago. Most of the money by that time had been used up for college, living expenses, and therapy. I had destroyed my car and had to buy a new one, which also hit my savings. This left me with a paltry $16,000. I told my dad that I might as well invest it at this point. I guess you could consider it my commission.



But my approach was much different this time around. I decided to take the approach that uber-investor extraordinaire, Warren Buffet, takes: pick a good stock of good value and stick to it for dear life, through thick and thin, for the very, very, long-term. That’s the way that it needs to be done.



Originally, I wanted to get a financial advisor. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough to have that option. So I used my dad’s subscription to Morningstar (a website that helps small-time investors help themselves) and picked a high-risk mutual fund. You would think that I would pick a more conservative stock, right? Well, since I had so little and because I intend to keep it there for 30 years or more (i.e. retirement), I’m not so worried. Since I am a bleeding-heart liberal, I picked an SRI (socially responsible investment). This type of fund only invests in stocks of companies that aren’t harmful to the environment and humanity in general (i.e. not the casino industry, tabacco and alcohol industries, defense industry, oil industries, etc.). And that’s that.