My incredibly ridiculous “investment” experience since the Dogecoin rush of 2021, and why it didn’t matter in the end.

Introduction

May 2020 was when I started my investing journey. And by investing journey, I mean pushing a few buttons in a brokerage app.

I had heard many times that the earlier in life you started investing, the more your money would be able to compound in due time.

Being already 19 years old, I figured I’d better start building that portfolio before I lost out on too many years of compound growth. Plus, it was a decent time to do so.

With the world going into absolute chaos, the stock market had completely fallen off a cliff. And so I had the opportunity to pick up shares on the cheap.

Sure, I had to ignore that feeling that I was profiting off of the destruction of the world, but yeah.

So I put all my savings into my brand spanking new Robinhood account and bought 190 shares, and then another 170 shares of Ford Motor that month.

My cost was $5.25 and $5.84 per share respectively.

As the lucrative opportunities of the stock market became more and more enticing, I added even more money. About another $2,000, and bought some 300 shares of Energy Transfer for that sweet dividend.

I regretted doing so when tax season came around and I needed to fill out three K-1 forms with the same, completely meaningless information.

I also bought a singular share of Microsoft and some other stocks throughout the rest of 2020.

The Meme Stock Craze

A new year finally rolls around. January of 2021, and my stock portfolio is doing pretty nicely. I was up about 50% on my initial investment and was looking for the next big opportunity.

And that’s when all the money started pouring into meme stocks like Gamestop.

I figured I would join in on the historic event and buy a share, completely anticipating the opportunity that I would not see that money again. So I did at the whopping price of $331.69 for that one share.

If that was as far as I took it, no big deal. Even if I lost it all, it probably wouldn’t have been a big deal. Well, that’s what I told myself.

However, there was another ramification of this purchase.

I was in.

With the allure of making 10-bagger gains, I was looking for the next stock that was going to skyrocket. I ended up locking onto the iShares Silver Trust, and bought 30 shares at $27.30, making for a total of $819.

But that wasn’t enough. I needed even more opportunities.

And that’s when I found it.

Nowhere To Go But Up

The coin had already skyrocketed from its original value. It had shredded multiple zeroes and could actually be expressed in a number we could comprehend in everyday life.

I was buying into the hype. People were posting on Reddit for Pete's sake, of course, I was going to believe them.

And so on January 28th, I made my first little purchase.

I wasn’t super confident about it. Everything was telling me that this was a really bad idea. So I started out small with a reasonable…$100.

That got me exactly 4200.00 DOGE for about 2.4 cents each. Even if it “only” went up to 20 cents, that would be a 10x gain and I’d have a thousand dollars.

And if I lost it, well it’s only a hundred dollars so-

But that wasn’t enough for me.

Only a mere $1,000?? What could I do with that?

Well, quite a bit, actually. But that still wasn’t enough to satisfy my insatiable desire to make boatloads of money.

I wanted to be set for life. Or at least, to profit as much as I could given what I had. And so I purchased some more.

Another 200 dollars’ worth, amounting to 7,667.00 DOGE. I was ready for this thing to shoot to the moon.

And Up It Went

Miraculously, this incredibly stupid move by me was looking like it was going to work out. I was glued to my screen as I watched the price climb.

It passed three cents quickly and was making its way to four. The meteoric rise was happening. It was actually happening before my very eyes.

“This could be the opportunity of a lifetime”, I thought. And so I put even more money into it.

I spent about $350 to get another 9,450.00 DOGE at around 3.6–3.8 cents a piece.

Anyone reading this is likely screaming at their screen, trying to tell me to stop. But I didn’t. I stopped for no one.

The price still kept climbing. It passed four cents, then five. Now it was at 5.6 cents.

DOGE to $1 was absolutely becoming a reality.

And it kept climbing and climbing and climbing and climbing. Six cents, seven cents, eight cents. I was up over a thousand dollars now. I was truly about to be rich.

And then… it all came slowly falling down once more.

Being the inexperienced gambler I was, I refused to sell. Surely, it would recover and resume its path upward to victory?

Nope. It just kept falling and falling. At some point, I realized that maybe risking over six hundred dollars on a meme wasn’t the brightest of ideas. After all, that was quite a bit of money for me at the time.

I panicked like hell. Back then I wasn’t as acclimated to the idea of paper loss. And I thought it was going to crash all the way back down. Back to the days of having like five zeroes in its value. I had to get the heck out of here before I lost it all.

And so I sold it all at around four cents a piece.

A Decent Outcome

You might think I’m one of those people who lost a ton of money. But if you do the math, that actually wasn’t the case.

I purchased a total of 21,321 DOGE for an average price of about 3.029 cents per token. This means with a sale price of about 4 cents, I actually had a profit of about 1 cent per token, which calculates out to about $213 in profit. That’s a 32% gain.

Considering the scenario I was in, definitely was not a bad outcome at all.

Let’s just ignore the fact that both Gamestop and iShares Silver Trust later dropped and I lost a couple of hundred dollars there, effectively negating the gain.

But a couple of months later, I certainly wouldn’t be thinking that.

A Missed Outcome

What I couldn’t foresee was that the journey to the moon was in fact, not over. Actually, it was just getting started.

In April 2021, the coin started to skyrocket again. It far surpassed any of its previous peaks in price. It all happened in an instant.

I had no idea it was even happening. At least, not until one of my family members told me about it and started talking about how much of a doofus I was for not holding onto my investment.

When I saw what had become of Dogecoin after I had pulled out, I was kicking myself. If I had only held on, I would’ve had…

*frantically types equation in Google*

Dogecoin peaked at around $0.68 a token. So my $600 investment would have been worth…

$14,498

But let’s just round it up to $15,000 so the article title sounds cooler.

Obviously, that was a huge punch to the gut. Now, rather than being upset I didn’t sell at the previous peak, I was punching myself for selling on that fear. That money could have gone a long way.

I had missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

But Was It Really…?

The thing is, was it really a missed opportunity? I can’t say for sure that selling wasn’t the right option.

There was simply no way for me to know which direction the future would have gone.

If Dogecoin had crashed back to its sub-1-cent levels, I certainly would’ve lauded myself as a genius for avoiding such a harrowing financial loss.

And even if I had decided to stay in the trade and watched Dogecoin rocket to sixty cents… I can’t say for sure I would’ve sold at that point.

Maybe I would have been just as greedy as before, fully expecting the number to just keep going up and up. I would have been holding on to that hope of seeing it hit that $1.00 mark.

Maybe I would’ve sold on the way back down. Or maybe I wouldn’t have. There was no way to know because I had never gotten the chance to experience that situation.

I simply wallowed in that frustration for some time. But eventually, it was time to put that money somewhere else.

It was time to move on.

Moving On

Even with all that had happened, I was still sitting on a remarkable gain in my overall portfolio.

Ford Motor had pretty much doubled and was now sitting at around a $10 share price. So I made a very nice profit off of that.

I didn’t have a ton of free cash at the moment, so I bought a few shares of established non-meme stocks like Logitech.

In the coming months, all of the other “short squeeze” stocks failed to go anywhere.

Anywhere except down, that is. And so I lost a couple of hundred bucks there. I sold them for a loss and bought a couple of “normal” stocks. And with the remaining money…

I had to “make up” for those losses and so I bought more meme stocks.

Blackberry at $19. Wish at $9.19. Blackberry dropped to $10.

*sigh*

Even with relatively normal stocks, I was setting stop losses because I thought it was the smart thing to do. And I ended up getting repeatedly stopped out from those investments at 10% losses.

So I was losing a couple hundred that way too.

So now as of June 2021, I was sitting at a kind of significant loss. My portfolio was dipping into the red. And losing most of the profits from my “normal” stocks definitely didn’t feel nice.

Maybe this was a sign that this madness needed to come to an end. There was no get-rich-quick scheme after all.

If I just put the money I had into safe stocks and was patient, maybe I wou-

Then I saw Bit Digital in the daily movers section of Robinhood. It was up like 30% in a day. I had to get in.

After getting my stop loss triggered and losing more money by buying at $8.00 and selling at around $7.50, I bought back in again at $8.42 and $9.00 per share in late July.

It rose up. I put a stop-loss order to secure profits. It was executed and sold all 100 shares at $17.39 a pop on August 6th.

I had basically doubled my investment in a matter of days. I was back in the game.

YEAAAAAAAAH

Back in the green, baby. See, I knew I wasn’t completely stupid.

Only mostly.

Alright, I had my fun. It was time to stop making all these risky trad-

ARTICLE: THIS STOCK WILL REACH $50 TO $100 THIS YEAR

I’m in.

Why was I like this?

The Next Trade

I bought 130 shares of Aehr Test Systems stock for $5.99 each. And then I set a stop-loss order because that’s apparently what smart investors did.

It got triggered at $5.40 and I lost a bit of money. But I wanted to invest in this company. Because the article said so, and I believed it because it said so.

So I bought back 50 shares at $6.23. And set another stop-loss…

And it got stopped out again at $5.59. I was basically tossing money away at this point.

Okay fine, screw it. No more stop losses. I just had to be confident in this stock, and trust that the financial article I read to validate my own choices had no bias or personal interests whatsoever.

That was easy. I bought back 150 shares at $6.58. The price dropped again, so I bought 100 more at $5.54.

The next month, the share price was rocketing up. It had doubled my money again. I had made a great profit and could cash out at any time to enormous gain.

But I saw greater things. And so I bought 250 more shares worth a total of $2,586.10 at over $10 a share. Because good investors averaged up, not down.

I read it in an article.

I’m Rich… Relatively

It actually worked out. It reached $12.50 at the beginning of October. And it was continuing to go up.

My portfolio had been in a rut, going into the negative overall due to the market at the time. That and the hundreds of dollars lost on those stop-losses, but we don’t talk about that.

But now, I had doubled my portfolio’s value. I was up about $5,000 in total. And so…

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST SELL ALREADY

Yeah, don’t worry. I sold covered call options so that if the price went above $17.50 by the expiration date, I would be forced to sell and…

$AEHR PRICE: $18

Wait, it’s not supposed to go above my strike price… I’m just supposed to collect free money. Why is it still going up? I’m missing out on so much profit right now… oh, screw it.

And I bought those calls back for an over $1,000 loss.

I thought it would be worth it in the long run, as I would be getting the rest of those profits. All I needed was an additional $2 rise to make up for it.

The stock price continued to rise. To $20, then $25, and finally $27. That is a fantastic profit, almost tripling my entire portfolio’s value.

And so maybe now was the time to-

I didn’t sell. And over the course of the next 7 months, it slowly dropped back to the single digits.

YOU ABSOLUTE IDIO-

But then it went back up over the next-next 7 months, and then some. I was so much in the green that I actually didn’t care much if I had to sell it anymore. Having learned from last time, I decided I was absolutely going to sell at $30.

So I started selling more pricey covered call options. And this time, I was just going to let them get assigned.

Just with these calls, I was making anywhere from $350 to $1,000 a month. This was actually the income that I used to afford asset commissions for my latest game project.

Finally, last month, the stock exceeded the $30 mark and went on to greater heights. And I’m not going to lie, I was still feeling uneasy that it was going to keep going.

I figured it could always go back down, and I should not make any rash decisions. Plus, I had to keep my word.

Well, it didn’t fall back. My short calls got assigned, and I sold the stock for $30 a piece, nearly quadrupling my initial investment at an average of $8.25 per share.

And you know what, I was totally fine with that. Glad, even. Finally, I wouldn't have to obsess about the crazy price fluctuations of the stock. It was time to move on to the next opportunity.

Well, actually, I sold puts to have a chance of buying the stock back.

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

I needed the income, okay? And I thought it might have more upside in the future.

I sold the options for $1,000. But then the industry released bad news and it tanked 30% in an instant to $24. And with the short puts, I would still have to buy back at $30.

So that was a $3,000 paper loss.

But thankfully, it recovered almost immediately that day. Realizing the volatility wasn’t worth it to me, I decided I had enough and bought back the puts for exactly the same price I had sold them for. No income for me, oh well.

And so, I somehow dodged another huge loss.

Conclusion

And with that, we are now in the present day of my investment… delusions. So where does that leave me today? Well, there is a ton of stuff I haven’t even talked about yet.

I’m down $950 on a Chinese EV company that might not even be a real EV company. Down 86% on that.

There’s also this biotech company that plummeted. Got a put assigned to buy 100 shares at an average cost of $6.50. Sold for $1.19.

I did have another biotech go up over 200%. Have around three grand in paper profit from a LEAPS option I bought. That felt good.

But then there’s another stock that literally went bankrupt. That was the first time I truly lost everything. A put option got assigned at a cost basis of $6.50 per share, and I sold for $0.15 a share right before it went under.

So there are a lot of pretty significant losses. And with all that taken into account, my portfolio right now is… still up 164% since 2020.

Ironically, the market plummeted as I bought my new, semi-normal stocks, so it’s a bit lower now. Lucky me.

But it peaked a few days ago at 195%, or around a $15,000 gain.

So I guess in the end, I was able to get there after all.

And that is excluding another $2,500 or so that was withdrawn to go towards my game dev budget. Definitely can’t complain.

In most of these types of stories, the person ends up getting burned and is left with nothing. Well, this isn’t one of those.

If reading about how this mess actually worked out isn’t making you angry, I also managed to avoid $FUBO plummeting from $25 to $2 by sheer luck when I sold to buy another stock. It fell within a few weeks of that sale.

And I bought $SAVA before the whole false data allegations at over $100 but caught it falling just in time to sell with only a minor loss. I didn’t even know what was happening, it just looked like something bad happened.

After all this ridiculousness, not only did I not lose all my money, I actually tripled it. (Please don’t kill me.)

Now that I’ve got all of these profits, I also stand to lose more. I’ve definitely moved away from meme stocks, risky options, and biotechs. Slow and steady will win the race for me.

Though I did have just one more risky biotech play that was set up with the covered call profits from Aehr.

I was down $1,600 on it, but I’ve averaged down and have 2,000 shares. If it fails, I stand to lose another $2,500. Quite a bit, but I’d still be left with most of the profit from last time.

But if it goes well, I’m going to go get a mortgage for a rental property investment.

Regardless of how it ends up turning out, this is the last “gamble” for me. No more after this. And I mean it this time.

Though there have been pretty big losses, as a result, I feel like I’ve gotten better at controlling my emotions and not acting so hastily. I’ve gained some knowledge from those experiences.

Although I did spend an hour obsessing over whether the new stocks I was interested in were headed lower, so I’m still working on that.

If there’s one other thing that could come out of this, it’s that it’s easy for me to frame the Dogecoin Rush of 2021 as me missing out on an opportunity. But really, that could be said for a lot of things.

I mean, if I had just gotten that max profit on Dogecoin, I could’ve had that $15,000 to put into the other stock, which would mean I could’ve bought 1800 shares which would’ve been worth $66,000 at the peak if I had timed the sale to be exactly then.

And if I took that $66k and put it all in some obscure EV penny stock that went up 1500% in the last year, I could’ve been a near millionaire. Right?

But, would that have really happened? Would everything have played out the same?

I doubt it. So maybe it was never a missed opportunity after all.

Even if I did “miss out”, there will still be plenty of chances for me. People will keep innovating, companies will keep working. That certainly won’t be changing any time soon.

There could be many “once in a lifetime" opportunities to come.

One door closed, but another opened. And it ended up working out.

Somehow, by sheer luck…

There will be plenty of opportunities tomorrow.

Opportunities for me to lose all my money.