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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

As a 14 year old in 1995 I advised family to put the proceeds from the sale of a house into Microsoft stock, which based on a cursory search would have ended up as some absurd number. One online calculator I'm looking at says $204,000 of stock in 1994 would be $41.2 million today after multiple splits and increase in share value. But nobody takes investment advice from 14 year olds who've spent too much time reading USENET and talking to people on IRC.

Even if they'd only put a fraction of it into MSFT and held it until only 2003 or 2004 it would have been far more than enough to retire on comfortably.

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I remember looking at AMD stock when it was $3.50 to put some money in. Never did because there was a real chance they weren’t going to make it but here we are, shouldn’t have looked at what they’re at now, rough.

Last year, I got an email from a college friend who reminded me that I'd told him to buy MSFT shares in 1986. Neither he nor I did, so I file this in my 'Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda' file, alongside similar stories about Cisco in 1991, Netflix in 2001, and Bitcoin in 2011.

I remember looking into Bitcoin in 2012, and thinking:

"This will never work as a currency, because of the max number of bitcoins it will inherently be deflationary, and the value will go up, which means that there will be a disincentive to spend it, because the value will just go up..."

Yep... Did not buy any.

I don't need to remember it, here's my comments about Bitcoin on HN in Nov 2010:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1943699

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060609

when they were valued around $0.30 each, or about $4 of Bitcoin then for $1M now.

I could have used BTC to buy into the ethereum ICO and I made up every excuse under the sun that a young kid who wrote shit python code could never compete with the gold rock.

Since then I've heavily revised my thinking. Primarily that I don't dismiss things as easily anymore. I try to focus on coming up with a reason to like it instead of disliking it.

I never sold.

You are correct about the negative aspect of deflationary, but if you believed in your view, then why did you not grab a bag?

When i was 7 in 1997 my parents had a little stock ticker widget on their desktop that showed how much their stock investments were worth. Obviously it was a long time ago but I remember often seeing MSFT going red. I didn't know much about anything at the time but I knew that the windows machine i were playing on was made by Microsoft. So I asked my mom what red means and she said it means the company is not doing well and they will sell it. I remember saying something like "but Microsoft is on every computer at school I think you should buy more"

But no one listens to a 7 year old about investments! (Nor should they in most cases, i think i told her to buy more yahoo too)

I dont know how much they held or how much they sold, or if they even sold at all, just a fun memory triggered by your comment:)

As I can recall from my memory, my suggestion was also prompted by the marketing hype machine surrounding the retail boxed release of Windows 95 as a hot new thing. And by that point in time it had become quite "common" for middle class households to have a desktop PC which had a CD-ROM drive, sound card, decent "multimedia" capabilities. And people were legitimately eager to upgrade to Windows 95.

It was sufficiently mass market and popular that it was everywhere in Pacific Northwest (Portland to the Canadian border region) television and print media. It was enough of a cultural phenomenon that I remember seeing media coverage of people who lined up outside the retail boxed software store at midnight to purchase it.

Oh how times have changed :) i actively avoided upgrading to Win 11 before I decided to jump to Linux for home, and im still not on Tahoe for my work computer

Hindsight as they say is 2020 and in early 2020 I bought Nvidia shares as I figured a lot people wouldn't have much to do except play games, sold them in 2022 as I thought there won't be many people upgrading their rigs as things got back to normal and there won't be much demand for graphics cards, made money, could have made more, oh well!

The same can be said for most tech companies during the dotcom boom.

I beat you to it by eight years. I was 16 in 1987 when I asked my father to lend me $5K to invest in Microsoft. It was at ~$0.30/share. That would have been around $8.5M today. He said no. To be fair though, he likely said no simply because he didn't have it to lend me.

as a 13 year old i wanted my mom to take 50 bucks from my summer job to take into btc. BTC was at .06 cent back at the time. Even if i just held it until BTC reached 20$, i wouldnt be working 9-5 right now but rather 9-1.

I had like 10btc in mtgox when they cut and ran, and never bothered pursuing it as it was “oh well” money.

You never know, in another universe it could have still ended up as nothing.

I'd look into it anyway - I believe a lot of people got their BTC or a certain amount of money back as part of a class action or whatever lawsuit.

From some reading up, you've lost nothing by not pursuing yet. Japan's Civil Rehabilitation Act requires the funds belonging to unclaimed accounts to be preserved and eventually deposited with the court, instead of being shared amongst other creditors. There is likely an internal placeholder claim number holding the proper amount waiting for you to convincingly attach your name to it. This is the world of law not programming, so I wouldn't let forgotten passwords or closed email accounts deter me if I were you.

A friend sold his house in 2005. He was a huge Apple fanboy. With the proceeds that were left after he paid off his mortgage, he splurged on a quadcore Power Mac G5, and a new top of the range PowerBook.

And then put the rest into Apple stock. I told him he was absolutely insane.

He sold about a quarter of it at some point in 2018, but is currently sitting on several million dollars of gain.

I still listen to 14 year old me when it comes to investments, like when in 2016 they whispered “GPUs are going to be hot shit because of this CUDA stuff. And games.” in my middle aged brain.

Gonna listen to my kid when she’s 14, too, as it’s been a strategy that has paid off to date.

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