[In the most unbelievable of circumstances, my dog actually published this article one sentence into it. Her ear hit the “Publish” button on my touch screen. So if you got some kind of alert of this article with one sentence, I’m sorry about that.] I don’t know if you saw the news, but we’ve got […] The post Three Strikes and I’m Out appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.
[In the most unbelievable of circumstances, my dog actually published this article one sentence into it. Her ear hit the “Publish” button on my touch screen. So if you got some kind of alert of this article with one sentence, I’m sorry about that.]
I don’t know if you saw the news, but we’ve got a new President. I’m hoping that this is one of the rare times that the sequel is better than the original. However, judging by the first day, we’re rooting for pandemics and natural disasters by leaving the WHO and the Paris Climate Agreement. Even if you don’t believe that those organizations help, it sends a strong message to the world the United States doesn’t believe in health and safety.
What you might have missed in the news is that the new President and his wife launched a pair of meme coins. If you don’t know what a meme coin is, don’t feel bad, I had to look up the definition myself. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:
” A meme coin (also spelled memecoin) is a cryptocurrency that originated from an Internet meme or has some other humorous characteristic. The term is sometimes used interchangeably with the term shitcoin, which typically refers to a cryptocurrency with little to no value, authenticity, or utility.”
The total value of their meme coins jumped to around $70 billion dollars at one point. They are very volatile and as I write on this on Tuesday morning, the Trump coin seems that the coin is worth $35 billion, and the Melania one is worth less.
How much is the nearly $50 billion dollars that the Trumps “generated” out of thin air in the last few days? It’s enough to buy the seven most expensive NFL teams according to Forbes’ value rankings. To put it another way, it’s worth about 20 times more than the estimated value of Trump’s real estate holdings – the business he’s most known for.
It appears that the Trumps can’t just cash out and take the money. There are some rules about how and when they can sell and release additional coins. In 2021, Trump warned that crypto is “potentially a disaster waiting to happen” and a “scam.” It’s funny how the definition of what’s a scam seems to depend on the perspective of who is to profit.
I imagine that somewhere Martha Stewart is saying, “And I spent five months in jail for making $51,000 from insider trading?”
In any case, I guess this is the new definition of meritocracy that the new administration is pushing. It’s straight out of 1984’s definition of Doublethink.
Sorry, I got a little carried away with that introduction. These current events are a springboard to write about a few times that I almost became rich. No, I never got close to meme coin rich, but there were (at least) three times when I could have reasonably made a boatload of money.
1. Predicting the Rise of Smart Phones in 2006
I had been using smart phones since 2002 with the Handspring Treo 180. In fact, I had the internet in my pocket a year earlier thanks to their VisorPhone Springboard that attached to their PDAs.
When I started this blog in 2006, I wrote about the Treo 700P:
“I’ve always been a huge fan of Palm Treo’s cell phones. If you are unfamiliar with these phones, they are like carrying a PC in your pocket. As Trump would say, ‘I love them, they are they best.'”
Of course, I wanted to capitalize on the trend, so I bought Palm stock. Palm stock dropped until HP bought them and HP never did anything useful with the technology they acquired.
Let’s imagine alternative universe where I bet on a different company to win the smart phone war. I used this tool to calculate the growth of Apple stock since I wrote the above article in December 2006. I had invested in Palm before that, but I forget when and my blog doesn’t go back that far.
A $1,000 investment (with dividends reinvested) would be worth $90,607 as of 1/12/2025.
2. Predicting the Rise of Artificial Intelligence in 2014
In 2014, I wrote an article, Making an Elementary Investment. The investment was in IBM Watson. Here’s what I wrote:
“In making Watson a commercial product, IBM hopes to bring in a billion dollars by 2018 and $10 billion in revenue in the next ten years (according to this article). That’s a really long term bet, and it may never materialize, but if it does, it is going to be good for shareholders. I think this is a move in the right direction.
…
If nothing else, whenSkynetWatson decides to end the human race, perhaps it will remember this article supporting it and make my demise a quick and painless one. It’s worth a shot.”
So here are a little more ten years later and it seems like IBM’s bet on artificial intelligence was a good one. I still own that IBM stock. It didn’t go up very much over most of that time, but it paid out a great dividend. It had a good year though, so maybe overall it’s not too bad.
There’s an alternative universe where I bet on a different company to profit from the rise of artificial intelligence. (Okay, I admit that I didn’t have Nvidia on my bingo card to win artificial intelligence back then. Did anyone?)
Using the same stock tool as above, I calculated the growth Nvidia stock since I wrote the article in February 2014. A $1,000 investment (with dividends reinvested) would be worth $362,799 as of 1/12/2025.
3. Predicting the Rise of Bitcoin in 2011
Yes, this is the big one. I circle back around to it every couple of years. On June 1, 2011, I published Bitcoins: The Future of Money or End of the World?
A key quote from that article is:
“Bitcoins open up a Pandora’s Box of questions and problems. I been trying to wrap my head around them for a couple of weeks now and I still can’t tell you whether they are the future of money, the end of the world, neither, or both.”
If you couldn’t tell from that introduction, I’m trending towards “both” being the right call.
In June of 2011, a Bitcoin was worth $8.74. I didn’t buy any. A $1,000 investment would have bought a little more than 114 bitcoins. They would be $10,752,040 as of 1/12/2025.
Final Thoughts
It’s tough to look at all that missed opportunity. However, I’d like to reflect on one my successes.
On June 4, 2012, I wrote about seeing an opportunity to buy Google stock. I ended up investing about $4,000 in a retirement account. The stock is worth 12x more than what I paid. I checked another retirement account and found that I had bought a similar amount of Google stock before that – back in February of 2008. It’s worth about 13x what I paid for it.
It’s not a 90x improvement (Apple), 362x improvement (Nvidia), or a 1,000x+ improvement (Bitcoin), but it’s not bad. I own plenty of Apple and Nvidia stock through index funds and I bought Bitcoin in 2021 and I continued to dollar cost average on it buying more when it was around $15,000.
Where are things going next? I’ve got a couple of trends that I think are worth exploring. One may already be too late to invest in, and the other may be too early. I’ll save them for a future article. To be first to know, use the email form below to get articles straight to you inbox:
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