Harley VanDeloo, 69, a retired high-tech marketing representative in Thousand Oaks, Calif., bought $20,000 in GM bonds a year ago, now valued at less than $3,000. Says Mr. VanDeloo, "I thought GM was too big to fail."
Cut him some slack, maybe it's his first trade, he still could learn... wait, I'm only a few years younger than him and I can't.. never mind...
Maybe he relied on a broker for advice, making him naive rather than an idiot. As the previous poster said, cut him some slack. Everyone makes mistakes.
Hey, Warren Buffet is down a load to at the moment. A whole load of genius hedge funds are down a boat load, and you pick on this guy? Hell, I'm an idiot too. I've been telling friends and family for the last two years that the housing market was going to collapse and it'll be time to find the mega house on the cheap. The obvious thing to do was to figure out how to short the housing market and rake it in if I was so confident. Well, I was confident, but didn't go for it. Cripes, it's probably been more than two years that I've been asking everyone who the hell these people were that were buying the mega homes in our area and how the hell could they afford it? Answer = they couldn't afford it! What about the f'in idiots at LTCM capital a few years back that rode Black Scholes to riches and back down into the dumptster. LOL
Yes, everyone makes mistakes. But the nature of the mistake is what separates the 'naive' from the foolhardy. He said he bought these GM bonds only a year ago. The writing was on the wall long before that. Easy to google, easy to see. An old fart like that buying junk? You are way too kind. You must be a liberal.
LOL, So kind people are liberals? Heh! Yes, the writing was on the wall over a year ago, I went to cash in all of my retirement accounts b/t Jan and March of 2008. But normal people aren't tuned into to every twitch of daily market events. I bet that 90 something percent (if not more) of the country got bagged in this Black Swan. I'm not going to argue with you over your labels, eg. naive versus foolhardy. People make mistakes and I'm sure that the GM guy has enough regrets.