But thousands reasoned that it was the buying opportunity of the year. They used every penny they
had to buy more at these "fire-sale" bargain prices, then watched the price fall to under $24.
Investors who hung onto Sun Microsystems, JDS Uniphase, Lucent Technologies, and the hundreds of
internet companies that crashed, lost 90% of their money. Many of them had taken huge loans on
their homes to take advantage of this chance of a lifetime opportunity to buy stocks that they
"couldn't lose on". And Enron? Same thing, people were buying more on the way down.
A 42 year old Connecticut man watched his $70,000 turn into $1,200,000 as his stock in CMGI soared
from $3.50 a share in 1998, up to $330 in early 2000. By January of 2001 it was back down to $2.90!
And what did this genius do? Bought more, really. Today CMGI trades for about 60 cents.
Many who sold near the market top in 2000, and then bought shares in stocks which have since
collapsed, have had to pay huge capital gains taxes or the alternative minimum tax even though
their investments were eventually wiped out.
The same thing happened to thousands of people that exercised their company stock options and then
watched their stocks drop in the tank. These unfortunate people, after becoming millionaires for a
short while, lost everything. But still, they owed the IRS huge amounts of money, sometimes
hundreds of thousands of dollars.
You see, the alternative minimum tax says that the excess of market value over the exercise price
(how much you made, in theory) is immediate income, like a paycheck, even if you ended up losing
money when you finally sold the stock.
The emotional whiplash produced by instant wealth turning to worry and fear, causes anger and
depression. The pain of losing money is stronger than the pleasure of making it.
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He who gathers money little by little makes it grow
Proverbs 13:11
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