The Financial Times today goes full @denlillaapan stupid (e.g. #743344 or #778958) and asks their writers and readers to offer some stupid financial decisions they've made/actions they've taken.
It's pretty fun. There's some about silly purchases, investments (well, "investments") in vacation houses or artwork 1, some run-of-the-mill stuff about missing out on free matching contributions to pension plans etc.
But the best is Gillian Tett, whose hubris and lack of intellectual humility/outlook on the world made her discard Brexit as a possibility (and the devaluation of GBP that followed):
"when the Brexit vote loomed, I vaguely wondered if should diversify — but failed to do so since I assumed that it was impossible for the British public to vote for it. Why? I had become blinkered, since I was spending much of my time in a bubble of people who — like me — had an urban, globalist, economics-based view. I assumed everyone would agree that leaving the EU would be against our rational self interest."
Oh, and then there's a compulsory bitcoin-related one. A reader, Jonathan, says that his worst investment was
"buying £10,000 of crypto (ETH, DOT and so on) at the height of the frenzied rush in November 2021, and recently exiting with £3,500. The only silver lining is that it hit £1,500 at one point — so I guess it could have been worse!"
Quickly looking up exchange rates for November 2021, assuming he YOLOd in at the peak (Nov 4) and had he purchased only bitcoin instead, he'd amassed just shy of 20 million sats at that point.
Had he then, instead of panicking and bragging to the FT about his "failure" held on to his 0.1998 BTC, he'd be sitting on a sweet lil pile of... £15,266, or an after-inflation fiat return of 26% over 3 years or just shy of 8% CAGR.
Good job, Jonathan.
Your error was of course to buy "crypto," but even more so to not exclusively buy-and-hold bitcoin
non-paywalled here: https://archive.md/aCCTL
Footnotes
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Joakim Book, "On Monetary Premium," The Daily Economy, Dec 31, 2023 ↩