Black Market Danny

I've been really fortunate that I've had a wonderful financial planner that has really done a great job for me and family for the last 20 years. Basically, I give him carte blanche and he has made me money over the long haul. I don't pretend to know anything about stocks or investing but there are times where I see or hear something that catches my eye and I want to do something. So over the last 20 years my wife and financial planner have let me play with $1,000 on buying a stock that I get excited about. Well, both times I've done this, I've lost the $1,000 in less than 9 months. You want to put a company out of business, call me and tell me the company is hot and I'll buy the stock or short the stock(selling stock before you buy stock) and you will get rich.
     This next story is how I was going to( along with a lot of friends and relatives of mine) get rich. The year is 1991 and my brother at the time was one of the largest bond traders in Chicago. He was really in tune with the stock market. In all his years of financial success, he never told anyone about specific stocks or any other investment tip because primarily his expertise was bonds and he didn't want to have it on his head if someone lost money from his advice. Well, for some reason my brother started to tell everyone he knew about this new company that was making a Cancer drug and the company stock was shooting to the sky. My wife and I, newly married, didn't have a lot of money but we wanted to get in. So I bought $2,000 worth of stock( that was a decent amount of money for us at the time).  The next day the stock goes up 2 points! Holy Moly! The day after that it goes up another point!  Now, I'm getting really excited. I'm also talking to a bunch of friends that also bought the stock.  We are all getting really pumped up. After one week of buying this stock, it has gone up almost 4 points.  My wife and I are thinking of getting out of our apartment and look at some new houses with our new found riches. Feeling great about this stock, I buy $2,000 more. Now I'm into it for $4,000 which if I had come home one day and told my wife I wanted to buy $4,000 worth of stock, she would have had me checked into a mental hospital. The stock is still going up. My wife tells me we need to chill out and take a break from checking the stock every 3 hours. So not only do I not look every 3 hours but I actually take about 2 weeks off from checking.  One night I get a call from one of my friends in total panic. He says to me "I'm killing myself and wanted to say goodbye to you"  I said "What??!?" He says that the company that we all own this stock in did some human testing and the person tested grew a third arm!  I again said "What?!?!?"  He was half kidding half freaked out.  The company did testing and there were adverse effects on the human subject. The stock dropped 75% in value overnight! So, not only were are profits wiped out but now my $4,000 investment was down to about $800! I did not know what to tell my wife. She's fairly conservative when it comes to money and this wasn't going to bode well with her. I told her what happened but we should hold on to the stock. It might come back. WRONG!!! It was falling like a certain cruise ship that hit a large iceberg. Finally after about a 2 weeks when the stock was in the proverbial toilet, I sold it and got about $350 of my $4,000 investment back. OUCH!!!!  So 20 years later, I let my professional advisor do the investing and stick to the blog writing.