I'll never forget the first time I invested in the stock market outside my retirement account. The time was 1997, a Great Uncle from Boise with no Kids grew up with Joe Albertson and got in on the ground floor with their stock. My Mom and Sister split around 800k of company stock that was inside his safety deposit box (Uncle had no Kids) so my Mom and Aunt were the heirs. I got 20k and decided at lunch one day downtown to walk over to Charles Schwab and throw the whole chunk on AOL. The broker Lady said are you sure you don't want to split it up on some Dow 30 stocks? I had been using AOL and was convinced it was going to be the first trillion dollar company.

Make a long story short I ended up doing a 10 fold on the stock in the first 2-3 years. Bought it around 38 and rode the high to somewhere around 175 I believe. The only thing missing from the Company was broad band, that was the craze at the time. I woke up for work one morning and turned on CNBC and the breaking news was AOL had bought Time Warner. AOL went from being basically a debt free company to taking on 30 billion dollars of debt from buying TW.

The stock was all over the map that day as investors decided what to do. The next day the stock I believe dropped pretty good, so I sold a portion and held the rest for a while longer. I ended up selling it all at around 72 dollars. I was of course kicking myself for not selling it around the high, but the stock ended up falling to around 16ish, so I did pretty good. Buying stocks is easy, the hard part is selling.

Wouldn't trade that whole .com experience for anything. I also met my best Bud and fishing Partner at the flagship Tulley's at 4th and Union in 1997 watching the ticker on their TV at lunch break every day.