What's everyone's mood like as of early October, 2022?
Me: Ugh, no great joy at seeing what I've "lost" (unrealized!) this year. But I'm still a lot better off today than I was at the start of 2020, when I suddenly had time on my hands and tidied-up my investments.
Ever wondered about how you would have made out if you hadn't sold a certain stock? Me neither. But yesterday I got curious about the nVidia Corp stock I owned in the late 1990s! This was in the midst of the tech boom / IPO-mania years. My token participation in the madness was to put 1000 USD into NVDA, simply because I liked nVidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). For awhile, not much happened, then the stock became part of the NASDAQ composite index, and within 18 months, value had soared 10x, and I was nervous, so I cashed out. Not too shabby, right? (cough) Turns out that over the years, stock splits would have increased my shares 48-fold from 3,000 to 144,000, and had I cashed out by early November, 2021, I might have brought in more than 40M USD, plus dividends reinvested - whew! But of course from my perspective in the early 2000s, this was unknowable, and much of the soaring value in recent years was tied to the rise of cryptocurrencies - nVidia's GPUs were the de facto standard for Bitcoin mining. But at the moment, the trend in crypto is away from Proof-of-Work, else crypto market values make crypto mining uneconomical, and suddenly, GPUs are no longer such a hot commodity, and in the span of just under 1 year, I might have seen my $40M fall by 50%.
Still, I gotta wonder how my life would have changed by having an extra 10, 20 or $40M tacked onto my net worth, and whether coming into serious money a lot earlier in life might've made me insufferable