What is Digg?54 Comments
- deanlowe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+36Just like Kevin Rose's "$60 Million", you don't get anything until you sell.
- vanadium77, on 10/12/2007, -0/+28You don't read financial sites too often, now do you? (Hint: Every site's selling some kind of service in this arena.)
- Hiltonizer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+27bulls make money
bears make money
pigs get slaughtered. - atgunning, on 10/12/2007, -11/+28Actually the simplest way to turn $3,000 into $210,000 is to spend $3,000 on college - then get a job.
- Ninjab3ar, on 10/12/2007, -7/+22"Simple way to make $3,000 into well over $210,000. BUY GOOG! "
yeah..... in 1998. - Wildthing, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14First of all, Google's IPO was $85/share. Right now it's $484/share. Do some math, realize that $484 is only 5.69 times $85 and apply the same to $3000 to see that a $3000 investment only yields you $17,082.
Why is everyone hyping up Google so much? Dell and AOL have done worlds better in their stock. And don't even get me started on Microsoft. Microsoft has split their stock 9 times already. Go learn something about finance and realize that Google isn't a one trick pony that beats all others. - sduffy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13MotleyFool is very well-known and respected financial advice website. If this is a fake it'd be the first one I've seen them print.
- Matadon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11I know that feeling. My biggest lament about leaving the world of work to return to the world of school is that all of my money has been diverted from interest-earning investments, and into...well, a new campus parking structure, from the looks of it.
- brhad56, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10How the heck do you just forget about $5,000? . It'd be like parking your car in the campus parking lot. Driving your bike around for the next 4 years and suddenly remembering, oh yeah, i have a car!
- Matadon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7This is a very, very good way to look at things. Pay attention to the ups and downs, and you can make some decent profits. Throw your money into the market where everybody else is, and you'll probably just get screwed when the next bubble bursts.
- alchemista, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Where are all the other articles about how people turned a $210,000 investment into $3,000? Articles like this are stupid, making people think it's so easy to make 70x your money. Sorry, but this article is ridiculous advice. Invest in a company just because you like their product and service? Making people think that 70x returns is something they can expect is pretty foolish (no pun intended).
Then going on to try to sell the stock adviser.... - merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8"Actually the simplest way to turn $3,000 into $210,000 is to spend $3,000 on college - then get a job."
No one gets rich on their salary, working for someone else. You only make really big money if you're the guy at the top, or you invest. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8This is how I got lucky. I got in even earlier because my best friend in high school's cousin worked for them early on and he was telling me about everything they did when we visited him after we both graduated college. I went back to Grad School and I had taken out a loan to pay for it, but when I got there, they gave me a research job that paid my tuition plus a small stipend. (Only $4000 a semester, but my apartment was $185 a month.) So instead of paying back my entire loan, I put $5000 into AOL.
Here is the funny thing. I completely FORGOT about it. I honestly did not think about it again throughout grad school and then with all the crap I went through to graduate due to my thesis sponsor pulling out on my funding TWICE and therefore having to start over, it completely slipped my mind.
That was the first part of my luck, because if I did remember it, I probably would have sold when during one of those two years that I got screwed, keeping me in college two years longer that I should have. I guess I was also lucky that I WAS kept in college longer than normal because I may have remembered earlier and sold once I no longer could live for a few hundred buks a month.
My next luck is thatI finally DID start needing money and finally remembered the stock at the best time. Late 1999 when the Time Warner merger was announced.
I still remember the day I checked it with a friend of mine who was more into that sort of thing. We went online to look at the graph and he checked what the price was in August 1994 when I bought it adjusted for splits, etc. He just stared at the computer screen for what was at least a minute and finally said "You really need to get someone to handle this for you. Do NOT do this on your own." When I asked him why, he asked if I had any idea how much it was up to. "I said I had no idea but wouldn't be surprised if it was "close to 6 figures" by now. (I knew it went way up, but I had no idea what it was when I bought it since I barely remembered buying it in the first place.) He pulled out a calculator and did some math and said "Ummm..depending on exactly what day you bought it that month, you are looking at somewhere between $400,000 and $900,000!" It turned out to be just over $700,000. (Though I got killed on taxes!)
My luck didn't last entirely though. While I did get out of AOL at exactly the right time, I did put about half of my profits back in to a few other stocks. And unlike the AOL where I got in and out and pretty much the exact right time, with these I got in at pretty much the worst time. All in all I can't complain. A forgotten $5000 paid for by a student load that was no longer needed turned into about a quarter million in profit. Not a bad way to start off my career.
My friend's cousin was even luckier, obviously. He started working there so early that his stock options when he left in mid-1999 was a few million bucks. He said it would have been higher except he did dip into it a few times along the way. - TheTankengine, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Yeah... except Google didn't have an IPO until August 19, 2004...
- pcgeek101, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6"hint: buy low, sell high. Right now google is HIGH, so it would be a good idea to SELL. Then when they drop you BUY."
I think you could've made that a bit easier to understand by simply saying "sell short." - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6That may have been true 1-2 years ago, but it is not true anymore.
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Of course, it was also possible that AOL could have tanked, and then you'd have nothing
- pcgeek101, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Truer words have never been spoken. Hold onto an investment blindly, and you're in for a major downfall.
- JRumph, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4While I certainly encourage reading up on investing, Jim Cramer is not the best source of information. He is good for entertainment value and is a good way for a complete beginner to get interested in the market, but long run he isn't going to be of much help.
If you really want to get into it, I suggest reading some of the better investment books out there. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6hint: buy low, sell high. Right now google is HIGH, so it would be a good idea to SELL. Then when they drop you BUY.
- Derekzw11, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'm actually in the process of reading that and it is quite good but strong efficient market theory seems unlikely to me. Warren Buffet once said something along the lines of, “I’d be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were always efficient.”
- PirateFSM, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Speaking of google, why are they so high? Aside from the "Greater fool" way of investing, what's the point? they don't pay dividends. I'm curious, does anyone own google here?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Hindsight is 20/20; it is easy to say that now. The truth is that back then you didn't know they were going to be the leaders in the market.
- Derekzw11, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2What books do you suggest then?
- spudnic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2So they came up with a theory on investing, it was thought to be wrong, they finally agreed and they pulled it. 6 years ago.
Hardly a scam - bels, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3hiltonizer = truth. Why you wouldn't cash out even just half that amount of stock is beyond me. Holding like that especially with the startup of cable internet is really stupid. Like they say, you don't have any gains till you cash out.
- jayesbee, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3This article is really no more than glorified spam. I'm really starting to resent guys like the Motely Fools who pretend to be offering free advice, speak in the broadest generalities possible, and then hit you over the head selling you reports and services and lists and tips and picks....
- inajeep, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Advisors do recommend buying stock in things you are familiar with. But I think your missing the point of having articles the inform. There are plenty of ways of losing money, most people don't want to read about them.
- MrUnderbridge, on 10/12/2007, -12/+14Um, this company called "AOL" does in fact exist. And people did invest in it.
- Sturmur, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Don't trust The Motley Fool. They got lucky once.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foolish_Four - zaskie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2nice article ...
like Hiltonizer said ... pigs get slaughter ... im taking the bull out of the mexican stock market ... 102% from dec 2004 to date ... not bad ... not bad at all - HaltingPoint, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5I was in a similar situation. I received a gift of some AOL shares for my bar-mitzvah. Then it took off and I stood to make in the tens of thousands from what was a $300 gift. And then TimeWarner.....
The good news is I recently found out that apparently I still have 24 shares of AOL that I had not known about. I thought I had sold it all when I wanted to use the funds to buy Lockheed Martin (which has nearly doubled from when I bought it. God I wish I had more money to invest!). - coheedcollapse, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yeah, my mom worked for AOL as a chat admin in her free time ages ago (like before anyone I knew but myself had it). She had a chance to get stock instead of a bonus and she chose the bonus. If she'd have taken the bonus and sold at the right time (before AOL started sucking - I could have told her about the right time myself although she still subscribes to it), we would have had a lot of extra money.
- coheedcollapse, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I know, but I'm saying that the odds were they were going to be the leaders. There's a period in between minor discovery to the public and mass adoption where it can be somewhat easy to predict success. Google, for example, was adopted by much of the technologically advanced far before the public really got wind of it. If I would have had the ability to put stock in anything I would have gone with Google. Yeah sure there's a chance that the whole thing will tank completely, but there's a better chance that it'd get larger.
AOL was really the only nationwide internet service around with integrated email and IM from the beginning from what I knew, so it didn't have much competition as everyone started getting their 14.4 modems hooked up. - fitix82, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1At the end of the day, it's all about risk vs. returns.
As alchemista said, no one tells you about the people who turns 210.000 in 3.000
The average return of the market since 1925 is 6-7%, after inflation. Anything above: as you win, someone loses. - coheedcollapse, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1True, but looking at the situation, they would have had to screw up very badly to tank. They were the "up and coming all around internet solution". At the point that my mom was working for them, AOL *was* the internet and no one really knew otherwise. It was obvious that it was gonna expand at least in the immediate future.
- dralter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This is how my grandfather retired with millions. Buy and hold. He purchased such stocks as Bank of America, PG&E, and General Electric. Of course this is over a span of 60 years.
- jdugan83, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Wildthing.............will you be my financial advisor?
nothing short of complete sexyness - honkus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@ Derekzw11:
Try "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Malkiel for starters. Great information, and compared to many finance books out there, an entertaining read. - washcapsfan37, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2A completely worthless article wrapped around a pretext of a possible false personal account. His basic advice is pretty common sense:
1) Buy a good stock
2) Hold onto it (read: Don't be a day-trader)
3) Don't be greedy (read: Sell it when you make money)
And at the end he hits you up to use their financial services.
Buried as lame. - AceTracer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Marked as innacurate.
"I at one point had $210,000 in paper money, but like every other dot com investor, that doesn't mean *****, and I at no point ever actually saw any of that money." - chead, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0He would have made even more money if he invested in winning lotto tickets. I don't understand the point of this article. If you invest in small caps they might go up or they might go down. This is not rocket science.
- jellygraph, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1You should always listen to your mom, even she knew that AOL was crap
- Pile, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1If you still hold AOL stock it isn't worth crap now. After the dot-com implosion and AOL's merger with Time-Warner, the value of the stock has completely sunk. That article is completely misleading. They're talking about a best-case scenario which is about as probable as winning the lottery -- knowing exactly when to sell so you get the maximum payoff.
I held AOL stock back then; I also held eBay stock too. I did much better from eBay because eBay didn't tank like AOL/Time-Warner. - coheedcollapse, on 10/12/2007, -8/+6atgunning, that's also a good way to waste your money. I'm in college and if I weren't still working toward graduation I'd have been able to keep a freelancing job I picked up near my hometown over the summer.
This constant striving to get a diploma feels more useless as the years pass. - Lari, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1Hey, it's a silly slogan, but it is true. This is why you should read Cramer instead of the Motley Fool... or at least take advise that either of them are giving on a regular basis. When you position is up that much you need to ring the register on at least PART of your investment.
- Topher06, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0Stocks are great pieces of fiction until you sell them. Hopefully YouTube will realize that before its too late.
- thegreyfox, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2@hammydude
GooG is low. My price target for GooG in 08/09 is $2,000. (pre-split) - thatgirlismine, on 10/12/2007, -15/+10@Ninjab3ar
GOOG didn't exist in 1998, *****. It's IPO was in 2004.
@atgunning
While I appreciate the sentiment, $3000 is like 1 semester of tuition at your average state university. - dattaway, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1AOL was good then, because they were one of the first public phone gateways to the internet. BUY!
AOL is not so good now, because phone based internet is becoming a peanut commodity. SELL! -
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