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Comment by nightowl_games | Hacker News Reader

In 2017 I decided to build a gaming PC. I had been out of the PC Gaming world for a while, so I watched some youtubers to see what I should buy. Ryzen first gen had just come out, and Linus Tech Tips was pretty pro AMD. Seemed pretty optimistic.

I bought a Ryzen 1700, and checked the AMD stock price. It was ~$10.

I told all my friends to buy AMD stock.

I had never purchased stocks before, but I was pretty sure that AMD was going to go up. I bought $500 worth of AMD stock at $12. (it took a few months for me to get around to buying it)

As 2018 went on, financial market started to pay attention to AMD. People were calling it a buy at ~30$.

I was pretty sure that everyone else had missed the boat and that I was in the money solely because of Linus Tech Tips.

Now here we are, AMD at $85. Thanks Linus.

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I bought 3dfx stock in the late nineties for a similar reason. It went to zero. My recommendation would be to sell some of your stock to lock in a little bit of profit and then you can let the rest ride and it'll affect you less emotionally.

It's such a good feeling when something gains enough for you to be able to sell back your initial investment entirely and still have a decent amount.

Same for me, not 3dfx but stock losses affecting me much more than wins. So I do mostly just index funds now to remove the buy/sell stress.

> I told all my friends to buy AMD stock.

I thought I should buy AMD when the Intel security bugs appeared. Then with the success of AMD's new line of procs, I thought even more so.

I didn't do it because I got lazy to study how one buys stock.

Now when I look at the stock I want to headbutt a brick wall.

Had the same exact thought and problem. Only that I bought AMD "fake" demo stock in my bank account on that same day just for fun. So know I can see exactly how much I could have made if I only would have bothered to get my real account to work that day..

Maybe we should still setup a trading account and buy ? Who knows where the stock will climb if Intel's image degrades further ?

I tried to get started with a stock simulator in 2016. The first stock I bought was AMD at $4...

If such a big company is priced so low it may signal an opportunity. It is similar with GE now. But there is always the risk of its price continuing down. AMD could have failed to deliver better products and continued to struggle. You won the bet, congrats, but don't think you will be so lucky with other stocks. And don't forget to actually sell the AMD to realize profits at some point. Unrealized profit is, well, unrealized.

I never recommend friends and family to buy a specific stock. This is a good way to loose friends. I am happy to share with them what I am buying though, if they ask

You got lucky and this would have been ill advised.

Congratulations on your bet though!

You should always look at how much something impacts revenues. For example, a 5-minute look at GoPro's financials would show that the company's stock price would likely fall even if all police departments in the entire world had contracts for body cameras. So just because you like a product and can imagine that others will like a product doesn't mean it is translatable to the company's finances or common stock investors.

No. Putting $500 for stocks of a company that you believe in and have a good product is absolutely not called getting lucky. Putting that $500 into penny stocks is.

Unless you have information on that company's performance that professional investors don't have access to, then yeah, it's absolutely getting lucky.

It is hard to overstate how ridiculously efficient the stock market is. If you think you're getting a bargain on the stock market, it's almost certainly because you're overvaluing the company, not because the market is undervaluing it. But sometimes when you overvalue a company you get lucky.

Big boys often optimize for a much wider set than the $500 investor.

You should've put more in. 500 is nothing

$500 is a lot to many people, and people have different tolerances to risk.

You may choose to put more in, of course.

I know. It was my first stock purchase so I only put in what I was willing to lose.

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