I remember looking up how much it was worth, confirmed it remained worthless and opted not to include it in the backup before formatting the drive.
At the same time, I doubt if I had had the wallet I'd have held past $1,000, so it's kind of mourning a loss that would have happened anyway.
>> The 10 most dangerous words in investing are “If you would have just put ten thousand dollars into…”
> Alright, alright, Templeton didn’t actually say this.
> But if he was around today, maybe he would have.
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/10/the-10-most-dangero...
The author, Ben Carlson, then notes:
> In the past 5 years, there were drawdowns of 30%, 50%, -60% and -35%. This stock was down 60% in 2020! It’s up a cool 1000%+ since then.
> And the crazy thing is there were plenty of Tesla shareholders who did hold on for the entire ride. They were true believers in the face of relentless negativity about the company and its founder.
> Kudos to them.
I've followed AAPL, BTC, TSLA, etc, over the years (here on HN and elsewhere) but just don't have the stomach to take the risk to jump into a single asset. I'm an index kind of fellow because (a) I don't have to log into my investment account at all and see whether it's up or down (and deal with the emotional ups and downs that entails), and (b) I don't really have the time/energy to go digging into individual companies.
Also, statistically individual traders are more to lose money than be up, and so I'm generally okay with "only" average market returns, as my main saving goal is retirement, and I can meet that with the average of at least 4-5%.
Don't get me wrong, index funds are good but if your cost basis is 20% and your additions are weakly scheduled (ie if you are > some % at a 1 month interval you add to the cost basis to make it 20% up)... it is pretty safe.
I feel as though people who view risk on the market as not understanding that options, uncovered options and all kinds of other money-wizardry are the things people refer to as actually risky. You can lose your whole investment and there is a drop-dead date with options.
Owning individual assets doesn’t preclude you from having most of your portfolio in index funds. The trick is to buy companies you believe in and just hold it. Don’t check the price every day, just forget about it.
Fast forward to now and I see those as missed opportunities, but the reality is there’s no way I would’ve held until now. Or I would’ve lost it. Or something else.
That said, I would definitely have sold them long before their current price, so I don't see it as a great loss.
general advice is to take a chunk of profit and let the rest ride so you don't hate yourself either way, basically regret minimization hedge.