Virtually 100% of the money that we have invested in equities is in our IRA's and then it's over 90% in mutual funds with only a few individual stocks.
It's been years since I've directly owned any stocks and my results were very mixed. I lost a fair amount on a couple of investments I made 25 years or so ago. One was in a asbestos abatement company that was doing well after some of those big hurricanes went through places like Florida and such, but they eventually got caught in a big liability suit and went bankrupt. Another one was a technology development company working on some new technology in developing safety syringes. They had some interesting patents but was always struggling for cash. Their only real hope was to get something marketable and then sell-out to one of the big boys in the industry, but again, they slowing disappeared (perhaps if they had hung-on, maybe with the all the vaccines, they might have finally paid off).
That being said, I did make-up for all of that, with some left over, from a single investment that I made about at about the same time as the two above. I had read about this lab down in San Diego developing a system to detect non-metallic landmines. Having been in the Army Corp of Engineers and having been trained in designing and deploying mine fields, it peeked my interest. Unfortunately, there was no way to invest directly as they were owned by a Bay Area company that made X-Ray scanners for airports (note that this was back around 1995). I bought a couple hundred shares for $1.75/share and then watched it for nearly six years fluctuate between a dollar and as high as maybe three dollars. Of course I was only watching what was going on down in the San Diego lab and how some of the field tests that the Army was conducting were turning out and things were looking good. That is until 9/11 happened. Of course, the landmine work was suddenly overshadowed by the fact that the parent company was right in the middle of testing a new series of airport scanning machines which went way beyond simply X-rays (I'm sure you've seen them with the various color-coded displays with showed different densities as well as more 3D like images of the contents of checked luggage). Anyway, the stock took-off like a rocket and I rode it all the way up to about $60/share when they were finally acquired by GE.
Like I said, that covered all of those other duds that I had brought at about the same time, with some left over. So in the end, I made money, but I also decided that in the future I would stick to putting my money into my 401k (my wife did the same) and long term, that was a good move.
We've been retired five years now, our only debt is our mortgage, which has a low interest rate and will be paid-off in about 11 years. Between my pensions (three of them), Social Security and our now IRA's, we're doing pretty good, and at the moment, we've reached our highest net worth ever (I was just checking that out earlier today as I was starting to get stuff together in preparation for doing our income taxes).
OCU
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