Monday 19th October 1987, with the previous privatisations being cash in the bank, I confidently stuff a decent wedge of my student grant into an envelope to purchase some BP shares.
Got back to my room, turned on the radio: Black Monday. Eventually turned a profit a few years later.
At least you got your money back.
I invested £4k in tech shares in 1998 at the height of the dot com bubble. I was only 22, just left uni and that was a lot of money to me. Within a couple of months I had doubled my money on paper. All looked good, but I didn’t cash out.
Then my shares started sliding, I watched as they dropped below my original purchase price but I wasn’t going to sell at a loss. within a further 6 months my shares were worthless and the tech company no longer existed.
So I basically threw £4k in the fire. It still annoys me, if I had put it into a vanilla FTSE tracker it would be worth £20k now.
There will be plenty of silly young fools doing the same now with crypto chasing a fast buck.
