Your post made me recall a relatively recent finance documentary I watched on YouTube: Towards the end of it, one of the warnings was to never fall in love or get sentimental about a stock. They specfically mentioned something like it has been in my family for so long, I can't bare the thought of selling the stock @30:12 mark
Yes, I totally agree. Avoiding misplaced sentiment and emotions is one of the reasons I'm a mechanical trader. The funny thing in this case is that my family is generally NOT interested in the financial markets; I'm a real black sheep in this way. I don't think they even remembered they had Nortel stocks (the physical certificates) in a safety deposit box somewhere until Nortel started hitting the news every night (in Canada, at least) and they had some vague recollection of the stocks. When I look at that stock chart I can only imagine what must have been going through their minds in 1999 with no real experience in the markets. That side of the family always invested solely in CDs. My great uncle was the odd one out for buying stocks sometimes. If it had never hit the news, they quite possibly would have forgotten all about the stocks until they had to get something else from the safety deposit box one day. I'll also have to ask my mom about the quantity of stocks...I have no clue. All I know is that if they DID sell in 1999/2000 then I can ballpark an upper limit on the number of stocks they owned, haha.
I think we all get hit so fast by these HFTS we get discombobulated and cant' react quick enough. I was curious Our parents did not like to sell things, my dad bought $2k worth of a store that went off the Exchanges. He tried to figure out what happened to his shares back in 1980, in 1999 he found the original certificates and called the company. The stock had changed his name and he had $15,000+ in a company he said sounded strange, it was VNO. The knucklehead was offered by Downey Savings to buy the stock my grandfather paid $500 for. He got a 20% stock dividend each year, Mom would beg him to sell once she found out it was worth $75k. Those shares would go to $0 during the Charles Keating Saving and Loan Scandal. Never understood why he did not listen to my mother who read more about the financial news than he did.