What Was Your Worst Investment Decision?

Ah no, im sorry but betting at 1.01 is foolish. As mentioned it would have to be basically guaranteed. I have lost money betting at those odds thinking i was being clever. Burned and lesson learned.

You stand to loose a lot for a tiny gain but something can and evidently does go wrong.
 
I agree with Clubman - I was just making a joke. I understand the implications of betting at 1.01! I'll not post further on the matter and will just leave with a question.......if betting at 1.01 is foolish, is laying at 1.01 not foolish/even sensible?!;)
 
Probably another bad investment decision, I invested in a Russian focused ETF, not a huge amount about 1200 dollars around 2016, it was actually well in profit up to 2022, it dropped alot at Ukraine invasion date but then recovered a bit and I still could have sold it with profit as they thought putin would settle for stopping war and having negotiations in first month's. Then putin nationalised all western assets so it has value zero dollars and also can't be sold for loss relief, it's basically a stranded asset with a loss of 1800 dollars. So that was worst investment since I never bought anything that turned out to have zero value. Just shows you though the battle Russia will have to ever get western investment into that country again
 
Just shows you though the battle Russia will have to ever get western investment into that country again
In the last 110-odd years, they’ve had a violent revolution, WW2, the barbaric regime of Josef Stalin, the Cold War communist regime, the fall of communism, and multiple invasions of neighbouring countries, yet you (and a bunch of highly publicised aircraft lessors!) still invested there.

There’s probably an interesting discussion in that point alone around the fearlessness/naivete/greed of the capitalist system. But rest assured, investors will be back at some point if there’s a $/€/£ to be made! C’est la vie!
 
Yeah, a quick killing in other words.... instead of naively thinking it would be a good long-term investment - the Govt said so :p
 
There’s probably an interesting discussion in that point alone around the fearlessness/naivete/greed of the capitalist system. But rest assured, investors will be back at some point if there’s a $/€/£ to be made! C’est la vie!
Investors came back only 80 years later though in 1990s, the bolsheviks defaulted on tzarist foreign debt and confiscated foreign assets in 1917, so it was a completely new generation of investors and a new regime in Russia then by 1990s. That won't happen now until putin regime is overthrown and new leadership gives guarantees of repayment for some of the western assets confiscated. Either way Russia is in deep trouble
 
"and when did you originally buy them"
I bought them about 6 months before for much the same price, read an article at the time that this company was probably not going to go anywhere as online books were not that popular at the time, and so sold...
 
bought them about 6 months before for much the same price, read an article at the time that this company was probably not going to go anywhere as online books
I thought maybe you had been caught up in the whole dot com boom and then finally decided to sell in 2011.
It just shows how long you have to wait for a recovery because in 2011 it was almost a decade after the dot com crash and companies like amazon and Microsoft had barely recovered their share prices of a decade previously ,and they were the survivors.
 
It just shows how long you have to wait for a recovery because in 2011 it was almost a decade after the dot com crash and companies like amazon and Microsoft had barely recovered their share prices of a decade previously ,and they were the survivors.
AMZN provided a c. 1,600% return over that period of time!

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@ClubMan Touche, I wasn't that familiar with Amazon, I just took a quick look at the graph and thought it looked the same as Microsoft and Cisco's the other dotcom era stocks which I was very familiar with
 
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