[skwirl]

By your definition of a "mistake", the biggest mistake you probably made in your life was not buying all the Medifast Inc stock you could get your hands on in 1999. It went up 16,210% in ten years.

But wait, it gets worse. Even just going back a year, if you had bought and sold the right stocks at the right times, you'd be the richest person on earth by far, even if you only started with a few bucks.

But don't worry, you could do the same thing over the next year. You've learned from your "mistakes," right?

In all seriousness, your financial advice is pretty bad and akin to recommending gambling strategies for Roulette. If you both realize you are gambling and are cheering each other on for fun, that's one thing, but I get the sense that you really don't understand that you are in fact gambling.

I have never seen a clearer speculative bubble (as seen from within the midst of the bubble and not hindsight) in my lifetime than this one. You just don't invest for the medium or long term on a speculative bubble. Bitcoins do have some intrinsic value, but as the author of the article we're all commenting on noted, the price of Tulips still hasn't recovered to its 1637 peak.

[atmosx]

Really? Is there something a stock or anything accessible by mere mortals that goes up 20+ times it's value every year? :-)

I bought and sold my bitcoins when prices where bellow 100$. Well, given the fact that I doubled the money I should be happy and brag about it, but I'm not. I could be holding 10k now and it hits in the stomach when I'm thinking about it.

On the other hand, I would never invest more than I can afford to lose.

[bushido]

If someone wants an accessible instrument that regularly goes 20x+ times initial risk in a year or even a month! look into the options markets. Remember to always only buy to open your call and put positions and sell before the contract expires if it is in the money.

There are thousand, if not tens of thousands of trades that can get someone that RoR.

I can point towards other instruments that can have that much or more risk to reward ratio. I calculate speculative risk at 100% value + incidental costs of the trade. So if someone said they doubled their investment that would mean a ratio of 1:1 aka a coin flip.

Though if someone did not know that these regulated speculative opportunities are abundantly available, they most likely should stay away.

[MichaelGG]

Well if you knew stock movements like the poster suggested, you could achieve huge returns by playing with options. Like the options on Nokia that went from a few pennies to a dollar or so when MS announced the purchase. Options jump around by a huge lot each week. So it seems that starting from $100, if you knew were things were going each week, you'd make a ton of money. (There's a limit as you get more money - it's uh, hard, to double a billion dollars on a limited set of options in a week, versus only $100.)