I live in Colorado. A few years ago, people started sporting garish, spectacularly ugly footwear that everyone claimed were the most comfortable things ever. Crocs, of course. Soon afterwards I began to see them in magazine photos and even people wearing them on TV.
The company HQ is only a couple of miles from me and I knew some people who worked there, who kept saying how business was crazy good. Because I didn’t like the look of the footwear, it never dawned on me to look into the company as an investment opportunity. One day I heard on the radio that the stock had tripled in value in just one year. Now the stock is overvalued and the family that founded it is extremely dysfuntional, so I have missed what should have been a slam dunk money maker.
Another one like that is Chipotle. Also started around here and everyone raved about the food. The stock has doubled in 15 months.
I’m a computer geek and just missed making a fortune before the bubble burst.
My options were at $35K or so just about when the bottom fell out of it. By the time I exercised the options, I think I made just under $4 on them and Schwab took all that as fees.
I wasn’t looking to be a millionaire, I was hoping for $300K. That’d be enough to exercise the options, pay the taxes, and buy my house outright.
Sigh
If I had jumped on the bandwagon a year earlier, or had the stupidity of the internet bubble last another year, then I’d be rolling in the daisies right now.
Our company has a stock-purchase plan that allows us to buy shares at a discount. They take a bit out of each paycheck, and then after a year you get however many shares you opted to buy. I did this for several years, and then we sold them all a little over a year ago when we were buying our house.
Now a bazillionaire has decided he wants to buy our company – he offered a little bit under double the current per-share price. :smack:
Somebody I know makes references to his $300,000 kitchen. He sold some stock to pay for a kitchen remodel in his home. If he had hung onto the stock, it would’ve been worth $300,000 today.
Most of my coworkers own their own homes, and have tons of equity in them. I figured I’d try to carve off a hunk of that cheese for myself, so I bought my own house. Last July, to be exact- roughly the same instant the market started to go down.
The end result is that I now have a huge mortgage payment, and if I were to sell my house right now (since I’m moving to a new town), I’d lose around $50k (assuming I could sell it at all, right now).
Not really something that I have failed to capitalize on, more like a little muse and dream that I have yet to realize, and I’m not talking about huge amounts of money.
But now, there are at least three new Fresh-Mex Restaurants in this area including two Chipotle Franchises… all within the last year. If I had had the presience and most importantly, the money, to invest in Chipotle stock when I made this post I might be making tacos now. But the downside is that I would also be competing against them now, as well.
I have a buddy that use to work at GNC, he told me about a new drug that was comming out and he was going to invest in it. A few years later Viagra made this 22 year old kid rich and now he owns his own GNC. Shit.