A very, very close friend of mine whom I work with and talk with 6 hours a day has in the last 3 weeks quintupled his net worth on a single stock.
I recently received this email:
Subject: Saint Corel
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 22:23:38 -0500
From: "xxx xxx"
To: "Daniel Chisholm"
Happiness is having 5000 shares of Corel at $2.96. I
don't care if he goes to jail, I love him
(figures in Canadian dollars). The story is this: This guy, a good friend of mine, struck up a conversation with me about stocks a year or so ago. I told him that I mostly did shorting, was really smart, making a lot of money, and the market was dangerous, dangerous, dangerous -- very overvalued, and I was terrified at how all the people I know would be hurt by what I considered to be inevitable. (See a recent post or two by me on this thread if you want an update on how smart and profitable I am now ... :-(
He mentioned to me that he had bought Corel, and I told him that although I hadn't shorted it, I had it under research as a possible short for a couple of years at that point. I thought that it was run by a flake, was very unfocused, might go out of business, etc. I sure didn't want a friend to get hurt buying a stock that looked "cheap" because it was only two or three dollars per share, and a former tech highflier, that "might come back" (a triumph of hope over reason?). He understood what I was talking about, and appreciated my opinion. I got the impression that he wasn't being foolish w.r.t. the size of his position, was under no illusions, and realized that he was making an "I can afford to lose it all, and might" bet.
Then on 29 Nov 99 I received the email above. And yesterday I was speaking to him, and he is still holding, despite repeated calls from his broker to sell. He's only turned $15K into $200K... ;-)
Our conversation finished up with him remarking (he's a very sensible sort of guy, he's under no illusion that he's an investment genius) how amazing it was that you make so much money "doing basically dick".
I told him that any time he needed more investment advice from me, be sure to call... ;-)
So: "tick, tick, tick...."
- Daniel |
