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What's the worst financial decision you've ever made?
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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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With all due respect, what you did was not investing; it was closer to speculating. If your time horizon is less than 5 years, what you should look at is a savings account/certificate of deposit, not the stock market.
I had a mutual fund once (the Putnam Health Sciences Trust) that went down three or four years in a row (probably about 30-35% total). The same financial advisors who recommend I buy it advised that I sell it for the last two years I owned it. I didn't take their advice and held on to it - the next year it had about a 75% increase. I would have missed that and locked in my losses if I had listen to them.
I didn't know 5 years was a cutoff for something be considered investing but ok.
Yes, you're right. I could have decided to keep the account open for the next 10 years and maybe it might have eventually earned a single penny. But I chose not to because that's just not what I'm interested in. You do you. It's just not as easy and win-win as people make it out to be.
Absolutely, everyone should do themselves.
5 years is the minimum time frame I've heard for stock market investments; YMMV.