My Top 5 Worst Stock Investments Of ALL TIME
- How's it going today, guys, welcome back to the channel. Hope you're having a great day so far. So in this video today, we're going to be talking about my top five worst stock market investments of all time going back to five years ago when I first began this YouTube channel and actually investing in the stock market. Now, the reason why I'm putting this video together today, is because I feel like on YouTube especially, and even myself included, a lot of us are guilty of just showcasing our winners and how much money we're making. And we tend to breeze over any investments that lose us money because generally speaking people don't like to talk about losing money. However, I wanted to put this video for you guys together here and show you my biggest stock market losses of all time.
That way, hopefully we can all learn from the overall experience and the lessons from these investments. So we're going to be covering five different stocks that lost me money. And there's two potential ways that I'm going to be counting here in terms of money that I lost. Number one, which is the more clear one, is when I actually sold for a loss and recognized a capital loss. So for example, if I bought a stock at $10 per share and then I sold it for seven and lost $3 per share of realized losses, that's number one.
But I also wanted to include a second criteria, which is lost opportunity. Which is when you sell a stock too early and then you miss out on a massive rally or uptrend. So we're going to be counting, not only stocks I lost money on, but those that I sold too early and missed out on a serious opportunity with that stock. In addition, we're also going to be doing a full update on my M1 finance dividend stock portfolio. So stay tuned for that as well. I also have a giveaway I'll be doing in this video and I'm going to try to do giveaways for you guys way more often.
I'd love to do one every single video here, because as I'm sure you've noticed, there have been more sponsors on the channel and I have been making great money with this and I want to make sure I'm giving back to you guys as well. So follow along in this video for instructions on how to win a pair of AirPods. If you're interested, I'm going to be giving away three pairs of these in my next three videos.
So even if you don't make it in this giveaway, there's going to be plenty of more opportunities. And if you guys have any cool ideas for giveaways, leave me a comment down below because I'm always looking for additional ways to give back to you guys for giving me this audience here on YouTube. So later on in the video, I'll be telling you exactly what you have to do to get a free entry here for these AirPods.
There's no payment, nothing like that. There's no course you have to buy. It's all free value here, guys. And you can enter a free giveaway for those AirPods, if you want to.
That being said, I do have a few quick disclaimers, before we open up my dividend portfolio. First of all, I am not a financial advisor. None of this is financial advice, and you should always do your own due diligence above and beyond the information in this video before making any purchases or selling any stocks.
This is merely my opinion for entertainment purposes. That being said, guys, let's jump into my M1 Finance dividend portfolio now. Alrighty guys. So the very first thing I want to do here before we get into my worst investments of all time is to do a quick update on the performance of my dividend portfolio since the last update. So as you can see here, this portfolio has now grown to a value of around 196,000 and the other day, it actually hit 198,000. So I'm really excited for this to break the $200,000 mark, because the original goal of this portfolio, which I started in January of last year, was to reach $100,000 in dividend investments.
Now I've largely surpassed that goal, but I'm going to continue leaving this portfolio here on autopilot, where those dividends earned are automatically reinvested and it is passively building value over time. So let's jump into the holdings now and take a look at the overall performance and the winners and losers of this portfolio. So coming in at number one here is Lowe's, my top performing stock that I'm up around 114%, Next we have Emerson Electric, which I'm up around 86%. Bank of America which was a somewhat recent addition to this portfolio, up around 65%. Genuine Parts Company is up around 60.
Caterpillar is up 55, leaning towards 56%. Up 51% in Apple ,36% in Microsoft and 24% in 3M. 3M has been kind of a dog in this portfolio in the last couple of months. However this stock has been doing really well.
And so I'm super excited to see 3M, hopefully continuing to perform well in the next coming months. After that we have Coca Cola, which I'm up around 19%. McDonald's is up around 18. IBM is finally starting to show some traction here up around 16%. After that we have Intel, up around 14 and a half. National Grid up 12.5%.
And then we have some recent additions to this portfolio. First of all, Texas Instruments is up about 8.2%. Johnson and Johnson, I've had this stock for a little here up 7.7% and then Logitech is another recent addition to this portfolio, which is up 6.7%. And then we have Walmart, which is the third recent addition to this portfolio, which is up 5.7%.
And then in terms of the stocks that I'm down on, I'm down about half a percent on Merck, I'm down 1% on Procter and Gamble and just about 4% on Verizon. So the reason why I'm making this video, is because when you see a portfolio like this, that is full of winners, it can lead you to believe that people like me, do not experience losses in the stock market. And I'm going to tell you right now that is 100% false. I have lost money. I'm going to tell you how much I lost and where I lost it.
And in the future, I will still lose money on certain investments. But the general idea here, is to have the number of winners far outweigh the number of losers and you want to be ideally beating the overall S and P 500 with your investments. That way you're adding actual value, by creating and curating your own investment portfolio. So that being said, let's now jump into the five worst investments I have ever made in the stock market, starting with number five.
So my fifth worst investment of all time is JD.com. This is a stock I purchased a couple years ago and I bought 95 shares at 31 47 per share. Now looking at the stock chart here, you're probably wondering how the heck did I lose money on the stock? And I didn't actually lose money, but what I did do is, I sold the stock way sooner than I should have. And I even paid short-term capital gains on this move. So I bought this stock back in March of 2017 at 31 47 per share. And I had right around 100 shares a little bit less than that.
I ended up selling my shares, when it ran up to $40 per share, because it took no time at all. And then all of a sudden I said, "Hey, I've made some money on the stock. Let me go ahead and pull the trigger and sell." Now in the short term, that may have not been the worst move because the stock did retract back into the $35 range before going back up into the mid to high forties.
And then of course, it went on a bit of a landslide here going into 2019. However, clearly this stock has done exceptionally well. If you look at the last two years and it even crossed a hundred dollars per share going up to 105 43 per share. But based on today's share price and where I purchased that because I sold this stock so early, I missed out on around $3,900 of capital gains.
And I would've more than doubled my money if I simply just held on to this stock. So this is the number five worst investment that I've made in the stock market. So coming in at number four on the list is a stock I am very well known for, and that is General Electric. This is a stock that I actually lost money on because I bought shares at a much higher price than where I actually sold them.
So with JD.com, it was sort of a missed opportunity where I should have held onto those shares for a much longer period of time. But with General Electric, I actually bought the shares at a higher price and then years later sold them for a fraction of what I paid and I lost thousands of dollars. So I ended up buying a thousand shares of General Electric back in April of 2018 and I paid 13 82 per share.
And my whole thought process behind the stock, is that not long before that this stock was $30 per share. So I figured here we have a blue chip stock. I didn't do too much research on the stock and I decided to buy it. And it ended up being a classic falling knife, where the share price just kept falling further and further down.
And if we open up over the last two years, the pandemic was a nightmare situation for this stock. Prior to that, I actually had an opportunity where the stock was trading almost at my cost basis where I could have just sold it, walked away from it and forgotten about this company altogether. However, that is not what happened. And that stock sold off massively all the way down to about $5 per share. So I didn't sell it that low guys. I ended up selling somewhere over here in the $7 per share range.
And I lost around $6,000 selling this stock. And I was quite a moron because quite literally exactly after I sold, the stock went into a massive rally all the way up to above $14 per share. So this is a tough situation you run into sometimes where you have to make a decision of do you want to hold on to this stock that you're bag holding or do you want to just dump it and get rid of it? I personally decided to dump it and get rid of it because I was tired of it and I wanted to put that money elsewhere.
So I went ahead and took that capital loss, which can offset future capital gains. But it just goes to show you you truly have no idea what's going to happen in the stock market. And your biggest losers, in six months could turn into your biggest winners. So oftentimes patience is the best trait you can have, when it comes to riding out a potentially bad investment.
Okay so before we get into my third worst investment, let me go ahead and give you guys the details of the AirPod giveaway. In the next month, I'm going to be giving away a pair of AirPods, to any person that signs up for my completely free, M1 Finance dividend investing training. There's literally nothing to purchase. You don't have to sign up for M1 Finance if you don't want to.
But all that I ask is that you check out that training and see if it is a good fit for you. I've had thousands of people go through it and begin their dividend investing journey. And tons of them have been quite successful with dividend investing. So if you want to check that out, guys, the top link in the description below is going to bring you over to the free M1 Finance training that I've put together. All you have to do is click this button here, drop your name and email and you're going to get that training sent right to your inbox.
If you fill this out as well and drop your name and email, you're automatically in this drawing for a free pair of AirPods, and I'll be contacting somebody in the middle or the end of next month to let the person know who won those AirPods via email. And I'll also be announcing it in the next portfolio update. I won't be doing the full email for privacy reasons but I want you guys to know this is legitimate and I'm actually giving something away here. So if you want to get those AirPods and have a chance at winning them, check out that link down below.
Alrighty guys. So coming in at number three on my list here is a stock called Nikola Motors. There's really no reason that I should have lost money on this stock other than the fact that I was just quite literally not thinking. And so what ended up happening here, is I bought shares of this company before the ticker change because this is a spec or special purpose acquisition company.
So before the ticker changed, and before the merger here with Nikola Motors, I bought shares of the actual spec at around $15 per share. And I purchased 100 shares. Now, shortly after that ticker changed, this stock quite literally went parabolic and it went to a high of somewhere around $73 per share. And I vividly remember sitting there on vacation in North Carolina, looking at my account when this was 90 per share. In part me said, I should just sell this.
This is crazy, I just turned 1500 bucks into $9,000 in a month and I need to sell. But as I'm sure you guys can imagine, I didn't end up selling. And the stock didn't close above 90 that day but intraday, at some point it was over $90 per share as I recall. So I didn't sell the stock. I kept on holding it, kept on holding it, kept on holding it. And then when I saw it hit $20 per share and it kind of flattened out here, I had to idea which was, "Hey, what if I sold all of these shares, and then instead they put all that money into call options on Nikola Motors?" There was no reason behind this other than an impulsive decision.
And I pretty much said, you know what? I'm mad because at one point I had nine grand. Now I'm back to break even just about. So let's just do a YOLO back here and see what happens. And the outcome was, I quite literally blew that account up and zeroed out that investment.
So I took $1,500 at one point, it was worth about 9,000. And then I changed it over into options around here. And those options expired worthless. So that was a flat-out $1,500 loss that I pissed away, based on being greedy and not selling when you see type, you know, some type of move like this. So that is why Nikola Motors is 100% on the list of the worst investments that I've ever made. So number two, on my list here is a stock I've never talked about on this channel, and that is Etsy.
So back in 2017, when I started off with investing, one of the things I was learning about was swing trading. And I wanted to be a successful swing trader. And so Etsy was one of the very first stocks that I swing traded. So back when this stock was about $10 per share, right around my birthday, I had some extra money and I put $500 into this stock and I purchased 50 shares of Etsy. Now my plan here was to swing trade this for a profit.
And I don't honestly remember, because this was a old old account that has since changed names. And I couldn't find the records, but as far as I know, I believe I made about a six to 7% profit on $500. And that's back when you had to pay commissions to your brokerage.
So after I paid commissions, I want to say I made about $20 trading Etsy stock. So I basically took 500 and turned it into 520 after commissions. So not a very successful investment at all to be honest with you. However, once the global pandemic hit, this stock went on an absolute tear.
And most recently trades for 204 55 per share. So the crazy thing is my original $500 investment that I turned into five 20, had I just left that money sitting there and forgot about it, I would have over $10,000 right now in Etsy stock, but because I was impatient and pretty much was trying to swing trade and make quick profits, you know I made my 20 bucks and I moved on, but this is definitely one of the number one stocks on my list that I just am annoyed about because I remember owning the stock and then selling it. And then when it goes up this much afterwards you really do start to kick yourself for making that short-term decision. And then coming in at number one on my list here, the biggest thorn in my side is none other AMD or Advanced Micro Devices. A lot of people probably remember this video back in 2016 where I made a video talking about why I put specifically $7,000 into a stock.
And it was this one right here, AMD. That was one of the first videos on my channel that ever got a lot of views and 6 82 per share, I decided to buy 1000 shares of AMD. However, shortly after that stock began to push up and at 7 51 a share, not even one month later, I decided to sell that investment, or maybe it was two months later, I sold it for a small profit. So I ended up making about $1,000 and my thought process at the time was, "Hey I just put seven grand into this stock. And then two months later I made a thousand dollars."
I thought that was a magnificent return, so I sold my shares of AMD and I said this was a great trade and I moved on. However, clearly guys, this stock had a lot of room to run here. And currently it's trading at $85 per share. But if we look back here at the last year, it's gone up to almost 100 per share. Now I've been back in and out of this stock more times than I can count. I've never had any wild, you know like a hundred plus percent returns from it.
But I did buy some shares of this over the summer in 2020 actually right before this move upward here. And I did really well on some tech stocks in AMD over the summer. But obviously guys this would have been my greatest stock market investment of all time. If I had kept those shares that I had purchased for 6 82 per share, I would have about $85,000 worth of AMD stock from a $7,000 investment, just a couple years ago. But my lack of patience, got the best of me. I sold it early.
And so this is another case of kicking yourself in the butt for selling a stock too early. So anyways, guys, that's gonna wrap up this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, I would always appreciate it if you could drop a thumbs up on this video and feel free to leave me a comment and make fun of me for some of my bad stock market investments. Or if you have ever owned these stocks yourself, I'd love to hear what your experience was as well with that investment.
As I mentioned earlier, if you want to get into that drawing for those free AirPods, the link is down below the top link for that M1 Finance dividend training. I walk you through step-by-step in a 30 minute video, how to get started utilizing M1 Finance, it's a hundred percent free, no upsells, no course just free value. And I think the number one lesson we can learn from this video, is that generally speaking, the stock market is a long-term investment.
And the majority of people who've made tons of money in the stock market, have been leaving their money in there for many decades. And so while it may be tempting to make these short-term moves in the market, here is evidence that you can oftentimes end up shooting yourself in the foot by selling too early and missing out on future opportunities. So, anyways, guys, I hope you enjoyed this. I hope this was valuable to you. Let me know what you think down below, and of course subscribe and hit that bell for future notifications.
And I hope to see you in the next video.
2021-04-27 18:58
