True Legendary Trading Stories

A few years back just before the bubble deflated, I started an internet site called www.123hits.com (no longer in existence). I put it up for sale for $30,000 because we where getting 100,000 hits a day to listen to our online music.

I was approached by a great guy here in Toronto that asked me if I would accept shares of a small public company in exchange for the site. I agreed and received the shares that traded at .06 at the time. Within 3 months the shares shot up to .78 and I was sitting on almost $750,000.00 in profits. :)

I set a goal for 1 million and waited because this company had a fantastic product that I believed was revolutionary.

Unfortunately the shares fell in sympathy with the markets and also 911 and they now trade for .03.

:(
 
I hope he sold it back in '01 when he might have had a profit.But that is a pretty tough hold.I cant believe that he would hold this long if he is a trader.
 
Here's a silly story...

Last month as my share of a class action settlement for investors in AremisSoft (which I briefly traded during the bubble) I got 2 shares of SoftBrands (SFBD.PK). Woohoo! They even sent me the stock certificate.

It turns out that SoftBrands trades at $1.23 per share. My position was worth a whopping $2.46. And it has since dropped to $1.14 per share. :(

I'm not going to bother with trying to figure out how to sell these shares and am just going to file them away. I feel sorry for the company, though, having to pay to send me proxies and annual reports from now until kingdom come (or chapter 11). Some judge was pretty silly in not requiring cash if the settlement was for less than $10 or so.
 
Wow!

Quote from thetraderprofit:

here's my story number 2.

One of my 2 roommates my freshman year in college was a Petroleum Engineering major. For purposes of this thread, I'll call him Ken (especially since that's his real name).

Ken was, and is, extremely bright and studious. He carried a 3.9 GPA in a very tough discipline.

Ken bought 1 million shares of a Texas penny stock oil company (it was either Golden Triangle or Black Giant) at around 1 cent.

The stock shortly rallied to, I recall, about $3.50, netting roughly $3.5 million on a $10k purchase.

This guy was very unassuming, and still is. Ken has averaged, in his own words, "a 22% return, after taxes and living expenses"
since we left college in 1982. For years he drove around Austin, Texas in a beat up car with no a/c. In fact, he still lives in an apartment. Since he was a millionaire when we left school, do the math.

Ken now invests in overseas markets. He goes to the country, talks to the managements of the firms, and buys huge stakes (often 5-10%) of a company. He buys cheap and sells dear.

Ken recently sent me an analysis he did of an Indonesian company, replete with his own 30 yr cash flow projections!
Talk about overkill.
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Quote from smokey_mcPaat:

ahhh, i wish i had dropped out of college to trade in 98-00, these stories of easy money- "i was taking a shit and made $30K" make me sick......now i have to slug it out for 20-30 CENT moves....boring....:mad:
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LOL
 
Quote from exce26:

A person who is 75 yers old bought Microsoft 1000 shares in 1985. He died by heart attack next year. Nobody knew he bought Microsoft shares untill 1996. His grandson found out the 1000 Microsoft shares become over $1 million value stocks after 10 years. The family sold half of shares to buy new house, cars, & put some cash into US bonds. They still hold half position into Microsoft. They are not planning to sell any near future. Of course, they tanked to grand father....
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"Of course, they tanked to grand father...."

I would have gotten tanked too and made a toast to... grand father.

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Quote from darkhorse:

I had an eyedoctor client who told me this story:

A doctor buddy of his puts 400K into a single tech stock. It runs like crazy, splits a few times, and after some heavy pyramiding the 400K is up to $12.5 million. The guy has a target price for cashing out. It gets within 10% of his price, but he wants that last 5 or 10 points. It starts coming off, he waits for it to come back, eventually it goes into panic freefall (this was around the time microstrategy blew up I think).

Of course he had been adding the whole way up, so the comedown crushed him- ended up declaring bankruptcy because he wasn't liquid enough to cover the margin deficit.

400K to 12.5 million to chapter 11
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The best (worst) trading story so far. Extremely well written!

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The NEW best (worst) trading story so far! I got sick just reading it.

:(

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Quote from TL Trader:

This happened to me not long after I started trading.

I had been jumping in and out of Call options on UAL for weeks as it trended higher and I was making some $$. One Monday morning I decided to go for broke and went long 30 OTM Calls for about $12K with 2 weeks to expiration. The stock went down every day that week. By Friday afternoon my position was only worth $2K. I was sick. I capitulated, threw in the towel, I dumped em'.

Well, I just thought I was sick.

Before the open the following Monday a guy named Marvin Davis announced his offer to buy out UAL. The stock opened up roughly $90 a share above that Friday's close and by OEX later that week had nearly doubled in price from where I bought the calls the week before. My position (had I held over the weekend) would have been worth about $225K - a 1775% gain, instead of the 85% loss I actually choked down.
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