I bought a small amount of META when the narrative of its downfall hit its peak. It’s the first individual stock I’ve bought in 12 years. I’m now going to be up about 60%.
This is why it's really hard to win big buying individual stocks. You finally pulled the trigger, and you won, but you never even had a chance to make more than a small gain.
Say you even bought $100k, which is probably much more than most mere mortals have the stomach to "place a bet" with. You'd be up 60k, which is great, but probably not life changing. And now you have to decide if you want to cash it out or let it ride and risk losing it.
On the other hand, it doesn't take much intestinal fortitude to park 100k in VTSAX and sleep well every night.
Depending on how much meta he actually bought, he may have made more money today with the s&p's 0.22% gain that he's made with meta all time.
But meta probably feels like the big winner.
But 5% is probably much more than anyone should allocate to a single stock.
And just to demonstrate my point, he could have bought 1 share of meta a couple months ago for $100. And he could have $1 million in his 401k.
With the exception of Apple?
I certainly hope that it wouldn't be, for the person who placed a $100k bet.