What was your greatest market trade ever?

Best market tirade ever

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWksEJQEYVU

For graduate school, I took every dime of student loans offered and dumped everything into Fidelity Tech Select(tuition, room, & board were covered by fellowships, grants, and scholarhips).

I sold in late '98 and used the proceeds as the down payment on a house: a little early, but the house did much better in the ensuing market meltdown than any other investments I had!

The best part was that I only just finished paying off the student loans (at a consolidated rate of well under 3%...).

Some options did particularly well for me. Shorted XOM last or 2 summers ago (can't remember which) and made about 200%. Bought some calls of SPY and PFE and made about 100%. Nothing too exciting recently though. Except one of my small caps (BITI) has risen more than 100%. Just luck more than anything.

Just for fun, I revisited FSPTX historical returns:

2001 -36.93 (at liquidation)

2000 -32.3

1999 131.75

1998 74.16

1997 10.33

1996 15.82

1995 43.81

1994 11.13

1993 28.65

So, money borrowed at low (and decreasing) rates invested in higher-returning instruments. Sure, I missed the bubble, but I also missed the bust(and the magic of compounding brings the 1999-thru-liquidation returns into the red); and I was just in time for the NEXT big bubble!

so on a risk adjusted basis you did average

Scatmandu wrote:

Just for fun, I revisited FSPTX historical returns:

2001 -36.93 (at liquidation)

2000 -32.3

1999 131.75

1998 74.16

1997 10.33

1996 15.82

1995 43.81

1994 11.13

1993 28.65

So, money borrowed at low (and decreasing) rates invested in higher-returning instruments. Sure, I missed the bubble, but I also missed the bust(and the magic of compounding brings the 1999-thru-liquidation returns into the red); and I was just in time for the NEXT big bubble!

I sold Lucent Technologies in December 1999 at around $77 a share, which was within a dollar of its all-time high. It started to fall like a rock soon afterwards.

More recently, I sold 28 percent of my portfolio on July 16 of this year. The market topped out a few days later. A month after that, I repurchased many of the same stocks at lower prices.

Hanover Sterling was a great find. working with them opened my eyes to what kinda cash we could make..

Sovereign

Equity Mgmt Corp

S.C.& T.Intnl

International Nursing

Novatek Intl

Osicom

Beachport Intl

All were winners but my finest work was with First Colonial Ventures without a doubt.

google baby

I always seem to remember the bad trades more than the good. I bot Apple at a split adjusted $5 and sold it at $11 and have watched it go to $135. Getting out too early cost me $160,000!!

Should have let it run, but I have many more that I did let run and turned south after convincing myself I was a long term buy and hold investor. Bot Sterling House at $12, it went to $35 and then bankruptcy followed. Buy and hold hurts too.

Makes me a believer in ETF's for a big portion of the portfolio.

I've made between 400 & 700% on a couple of small cap penny stocks in the last 4 years, but I don't think it's even made a dent in what I lost on some techs like PSINet. I got raped on that stock. The thing went to pennies before I had a chance to react.

on thursday I bought VCLK at 20.14, went all in, all margin, so basically double my money (not that I have much, but you get the point). It is trading at 24.36 right now.

I like to think I can be a fairly bright guy (don't we all?), but I'm pretty dense when it comes to money. The idea of money simply never interested me enough I guess.

My most memorable trades have all been bad... :-(

I generally don't do extremely short-term trades, but I had to make an exception on this one.

In Feb 99, ENMD was trading at 24. Then one day, bad news came out and it started tanking hard. When it hit 12, I bought very cheap call options struck at 20 with some extra money I had. The very next day after that, the stock rebounded back to 24 when it was discovered that the bad news was caused by a reporter misquoting someone in management. I sold the options.

10 times my money in one day, I will probably never top that one again.

I bought the Chinese internet stock Netease on November 12 of 2002 and sold it on September 30 of 2003:

NTES Close November 12, 2002 = 3.35

NTES Close September 23, 2003 = 67.58

anEconomist wrote:

so on a risk adjusted basis you did average

I got in late '94 and out late '98; regardless of risk, I consider a 33% annualized return to be acceptable, especially for "found" money (and given that, at that time, I was guessing).

I remain proud that I am one of the few folks who LEFT grad skool with more money than I went IN with.

Entered the miltary with $13k in debt (which seemed to be real money at the time); left the military with $20k in the bank; entered grad skool; let grad skool and bought a house; retirement is fully funded at this time; working on the college funds.

Yah, I'm pretty proud of myself; thanks!

summer of 2006. it was insane.

made 100% on one trade, then 2 weeks later another 120% on another trade. a month after that I made 35% on yet another trade. I was sitting pretty, I was.

Until Feb 27th when I was long on margin, and again this summer. Yeah, I was long on margin for American Home. My thinking was it would be bailed.

thats how this game works. average, I'm up only 40% from beginning of 2006. Pretty, pretty pretty bad.

anEconomist wrote:

so on a risk adjusted basis you did average

So far in the 2000s, I have averaged a little over 21%/year. (I am particularly proud of my *worst* year--2000--when my portfolio returned -0.1%; how'd *you* do?)

Wins are great, but (as others have noted) not if they are wiped out by losses.

"Liquidation" in my previous post refers to liquidation of the fund itself (gotta merge those poor performance records), not *my* liquidation; perhaps that was your misunderstanding.

Bought Deutchmark futures in September 1993. Rolled the contract over several times, bought an additional contract along the way, and finally sold in November 1994 (as the US economoy was starting to turn) for roughly a $45000 profit on an initial margin of about $1000.

Bought Intel on 6/12/91 for 54.75. Bought Microsoft on 6/15/92 for 76.50. Sold both on September 8, 1998 for gains of 1090% and 966%.

More recently, bought SP500 futures in April,2005 at cash value of 1159. Rolled over since and still holding at cash value 1517. At $250 per point, present gain on minimum margin: 539%.

This is ALL buy and hold. Holding futures positions for 1-3 years is geologic timeframe to those guys.