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What's the worst investment you've made?

Discuss Stock buying Shares, tips and ideas for stock market dealing
Gengulphus
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#133725

Postby Gengulphus » April 21st, 2018, 11:43 am

AndyPandy wrote:Went to sell some Centrica (CNA) a couple of months back. Fat fingers meant I sold CLLN instead. Kicking myself, I bought back the CLLN and then some to average down.

I think you'll find that time has been flying - that must have been more than "a couple of months back"!

Gengulphus

AleisterCrowley
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#133727

Postby AleisterCrowley » April 21st, 2018, 11:55 am

Carillion of course, my only total wipe out.
And, like a poster above, not buying a flat in Ealing in 1993 when I moved there. On the other hand, I guess there are lots of people kicking themselves for selling London property in the early 90s...

melonfool
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#133807

Postby melonfool » April 21st, 2018, 9:03 pm

Yes, Carillion for me too. About £3k loss, though I sold before the full crash, after the main crash last July though.

Mel

AleisterCrowley
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#133821

Postby AleisterCrowley » April 21st, 2018, 10:00 pm

£3k is my normal investment 'chunk' but I was nervous about Carillion and (from memory) reduced to £2,200 or so.
I should have listened to my inner voice, and avoided them ...
(Diverse income streams lots of solid government contracts- what could go wrong??)

bungeejumper
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#133879

Postby bungeejumper » April 22nd, 2018, 10:14 am

Proportionally speaking, two AIM wipe-outs. The good news was that I didn't have more than £500 in either. The better news is that the learning process was the best investment I ever had. :P

BJ

(Second best investment? Going 60% cash in early 2008. :twisted:)

AleisterCrowley
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#134070

Postby AleisterCrowley » April 23rd, 2018, 10:51 am

I too console myself that my losses were simply an expensive 'training course'
Sometimes i believe it.

Dod101
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#134095

Postby Dod101 » April 23rd, 2018, 12:12 pm

I have managed to avoid recent disasters but my biggest loss was painful, Cable & Wireless in 2000. My holding was worth £30,000 at the beginning of that year as a result of the tech boom and I held on and on and on.........I think I eventually sold for about £2,500. That was a big loss at any time but nearly 20 years ago? I consoled myself that a lot of the £30,000 was only on paper and I probably paid only a few thousand but it sure hurt and it is why I take a fairly robust attitude to problem shares nowadays.

Dod

Bluestone77
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#134799

Postby Bluestone77 » April 25th, 2018, 10:15 pm

Companies that I had shares in that went to zero:
In 2002:
Photobition
Sportsworld Media Group
In 2003:
SFI
Had about £2k in each.

At least when Alizyme went to zero in 2009? I had sold enough prior to that event to make a good profit overall.

I view the above as a learning curve and concentrated my investments in investment trusts. I now only own shares in 3 companies (excluding IT's) and they account for less than 2% of my portfolio.

TheWildshot
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#136452

Postby TheWildshot » May 2nd, 2018, 9:22 pm

I'll hold my hands up and admit that I had about 6% of my portfolio in Globo when it was suspended and then liquidated. At that time I was reading but ignoring the negative comments on ADVFN. If only I read the daily Paul Scott SCVR at that time on Stockopedia I may have come to my senses?

In terms of opportunities missed as mentioned earlier then yes I missed out on Lo-Q too. I researched it late in the last decade and since it didn't qualify for an ISA (per ISA rules at that time) I didn't invest. Genuinely that is the only reason I didn't go in on it. D'oh!

Clitheroekid
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#136700

Postby Clitheroekid » May 3rd, 2018, 10:57 pm

TheWildshot wrote:In terms of opportunities missed as mentioned earlier then yes I missed out on Lo-Q too. I researched it late in the last decade and since it didn't qualify for an ISA (per ISA rules at that time) I didn't invest. Genuinely that is the only reason I didn't go in on it. D'oh!

Another Lo-Q `victim' here - viewtopic.php?p=82607#p82607

In fact, the shares that would have been worth £300k when I posted that would now be worth about £355k! Not bad for a £5k investment.

One lesson I did learn from Lo-Q is that one should not ignore momentum. If you find a share that ticks all the boxes it's not uncommon for others to have found it as well, so that the price has already risen since you first spotted it. I have far too often taken the view that I was too late and that the ship had already sailed, only - as with Lo-Q - to see the price continue to rise into the stratosphere.

Of course the difficulty is identifying those occasions when the ship that's sailed is actually the Titanic ...

bruncher
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#137606

Postby bruncher » May 8th, 2018, 6:03 pm

Transtec and Baltimore. Ouch!

FoolishFilFive
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#137776

Postby FoolishFilFive » May 9th, 2018, 1:28 pm

RBS "What can go wrong with a bank? safe as houses, just collect the divi"

Cattles "recession coming - demand is bound to rocket for what they do"

ArmourGroup "security firm working in Iraq - good demand there, surely"

Drax "they may be environmentally unfriendly, but people need power, so they're bound to be fine"

Sigh. That's better.

MaraMan
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#137817

Postby MaraMan » May 9th, 2018, 4:02 pm

RBS just before the banking crisis
BP just before the Deepwater Horizon problem
Audioboom due to my own gullibility

Luckily the successes have kept me at it.


MM

doug2500
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#137836

Postby doug2500 » May 9th, 2018, 5:08 pm

RBS was probably my biggest mistake that I managed to sell, including topping up with the rights issue.

I also had two that went bust after a few name changes: Black rock oil and gas & Kimcor diamonds

They were both bought in my early days, on the back of tips on the ii website (my broker back then). In fact black rock was my first share bought online in a brokers account. I already had some certificates, but this was me branching out on my own. These were a loss of £500 each and worth the money in learning! I wouldn't touch shares like that now, and would get out quicker if I did.

Like others I think I've 'lost' more money selling too early than buying wrong un's. The one that sticks in mind was croda, wish I still owned it but it's always too expensive. You won't go bust taking a profit, but you won't catch the upside of a great share either. LTBH for me now.

bobsmydog
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#141547

Postby bobsmydog » May 26th, 2018, 6:38 pm

Split capital investment trusts, way back when I was cajoled into thinking they were safe as houses.

Oh and before that there was a tech VCT at the height of the dot com boom (to reduce CGT :roll: )

ADrunkenMarcus
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#141575

Postby ADrunkenMarcus » May 26th, 2018, 10:01 pm

I sold out of Plus500 around £4 in 2015, after I lost confidence in management when they accepted what seemed to be a ridiculously low-ball bid for the company by Playtech. Needless to say, the shares hit £17 this week.

Best wishes

Mark.

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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#143205

Postby Cmack » June 3rd, 2018, 10:46 am

Seems like as good a place as any to make my first post.

I made my first ever investment in January 2016 after spending months reading up on finance and investment.

I bought £200 of Glencore (I wanted to dip my toes with an amount I could easily afford to write off completely) at 86p, I then sold out at 132p thinking how marvellous a trade I had made. Patience is indeed a virtue.

I actually had a similar instance of premature selling with my second investment, another £200 toe dipper in Creightons at 7.9p, it's around 25p now and has been in the 30s. I think I sold that around 9p thinking that there were no legs in it to go any further.

As mentioned, these were 'trial runs' in my mind, and although I was more concerned with substantial drops, it has given me the lesson regarding opportunity losses caused by premature sale. Not huge amounts due to low investment size, so a fairly painless lesson which I'm glad to have learned early on.

Pipsmum
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Re: What's the worst investment you've made?

#143570

Postby Pipsmum » June 4th, 2018, 2:01 pm

Similar. I've twice bought and sold some FDP at exactly the wrong times. Still at a slight profit, but one took only an afternoon to get twice as high again, to my chagrin. Patience is indeed a virtue, but just sometimes I really need the money back, and should have hung on a tiny bit longer or looked elsewhere for it before cashing in. Still, from what has been realised, then it is up by about 2.2%, but the rest is still stuck in for a while jousting for the best negative position. Serves me right for using shares as a babysitter instead of an interest account but it was deliberately done. The bigger yields make up for much such as NRR.

Cashing in a loser to keep a winner running is what is needed but that takes gumption.


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