Tom's daily Commentary this evening regarding the similarity of the current market to 1999 sure brings back memories. I'll never forget it.
There was so much excitement in 1999 and everyone was busy getting faster dial-up internet service and opening up brokerage accounts. I transferred my IRA that I had been nurturing for 15 years from Vanguard to Datek (which later became TD Ameritrade) in late 1999 and joined the party.
I started out doing well and increased the account value by over 10% by March of 2000.
Then in late March me and 3 buddies went to Reno to bet on March Madness games and other fun. I'll never forget sitting in a lounge where during the day most of the TV's were tuned to CNBC rather than the basketball games, and everyone was glued to all the green arrows in the ticker on the TV's and talking about all the stocks that were making them rich...Cisco and Broadcom and AOL and such...every day there was news of stock splits and even QQQ had done a 2 for 1 split the prior week...
Well, that was Friday March 24th, 2000. It was the day of the very top. While everyone was all smiles and QQQ was up nearly 4% that morning, little did we know that was the dot.com bubble blow-off top, and what was next...was three loooooong years of misery in the market.
I was a novice trader and over the next 3 years managed to lose 99% of my IRA. Yep, 99%. The final blow was at the end when I put what I had left into a sure thing stock called AremisSoft, a software company that a billionaire (who later committed suicide) was crowing about...turned out it was a scam company owned by two Greeks that pulled off the biggest scam in Wall Street history until Bernie Madoff took that crown...I didn't touch the IRA for a few years after that in disgust and just focused on the TSP, which much of the time I was too terrified to put into stocks due to the PTSD of the IRA losses. Eventually I figured out I could roll it over into a Roth IRA and pay zero taxes since the value was below what I had put into it, and since then over the years I slowly grew it, until last year... boom it really exploded to up over $100K and then even $200K in value, quite the rebound from about $500 in 2003, but it took two decades to do it.
If this link works here's the data on QQQ during the first few months of 2000. Yep, 3/24/00 was the top....
Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) Stock Historical Prices & Data - Yahoo Finance
I had a pretty good year investing-wise...up about 18% in my traditional IRA that I moved from the TSP 10 months ago. It's all invested in 49 high dividend stocks and fixed income, earning a nice return of 11.54% currently...in the old Roth IRA I didn't do so hot this year, a tiny gain after 100's of trades... too much options trading LOL, but it's all play money and pays for lots of toys and travelling every year...as are two small taxable accounts I have and for those I managed to gain 55% in one and 45% in the other so far this year, not bad...MARA has been the latest money maker for me.
Happy New Year everyone! Can't believe I've now been retired 5 years. I can report there is life after working, and it's even better when you escape the TSP.
