The trouble with experience.
The young are willing "to boldly go where no man has gone before." Sometimes that is an advantage.
My problem is that I see the past, perhaps too well. I learned the wrong things.
I am 72 years old. I have learned lessons that have served me both well and poorly. The lessons that have served me well seem obvious in hindsight. The memories I reflect on in quiet moments are the mistakes. For example, it is a mistake to notice that "to boldly go" splits an infinitive. Hardly anyone cares anymore.
I learned the lesson that is useful to know that in corporate reorganizations and mergers the acquiring company is the winner and the acquired company is a meal, not a partner. I learned that the acquiring company lies about that at first, telling the acquired company that they love the employees and they should stay put. They do value employees, in the way a predator lion loves a fawn it wants to kill and eat later. Experience didn't help me survive there. I was lucky, not smart. The acquiring companies wanted my clients, and to keep them they were stuck with me.
I was a Financial Advisor for 30 years and did not strike it rich. I had a hundred opportunities to get seriously wealthy and missed every one. My experience taught me that bad things sometimes happen to stocks, so I was cautious. I know other people who happened to have worked for companies that did great. Their experience is that boldness works. They might own tons of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Tesla, or Amazon.
Any young middle-income saver who put an investment amount common among such investors, perhaps $10,000, into one or several of these at various times over the past 20 and 30 years, and held them, would now be a multi-multi millionaire. That could have been me, except I was prudent, not bold. I learned from the 1987 crash that bad things happen. I kept diversifying and would sell off positions as they got big. My mistake.
I had watched the most admired, cutting-edge companies, ones like Enron, collapse amid revelations of phony bookkeeping. I remember my company's most respected investment analyst write on company letterhead that any Financial Advisor whose clients weren't loaded up with WorldCom should leave the profession because he or she is too stupid to advise clients. WorldCom went bust. American International Group, AIG, was AAA rated and a leader in an innovative way to make endless amounts of risk-free money, insuring risk-free mortgage investments. What a deal! Oops.
My own employer, Citigroup, helped lead the charge into the quicksand of creating and owning structured mortgages in the mid-2000s, only to collapse into federal life support and bailouts. Its stockholders, including me, were nearly wiped out. I lived it. Unfortunate things happen.
Therefore, I haven't believed in Tesla, a car company that is valued at more than the combined value of all the other car companies in the world. It makes no sense to me. I am stuck in the past. I missed out.
I haven't bought a Non-Fungible Token, a NFT, even as I watched young people strike it rich buying unique, but identified, images identical to images that are available for free. What is the value of that, I wonder? I had watched Beanie Babies go up in value and disappear as worthless. My experience made me miss out.
I don't own Bitcoin either. It is a currency invented out of nothing with no guarantee that it can be used for anything useful, for example paying taxes. Bitcoin seemed to me like the magic beans in the Jack and the Beanstalk story. No thanks. It was valued at $4.00 back in 2012. It is valued at $64,000 now. I had $10,000 I could easily have invested anytime around then, just a tiny speculation, why not? It would be valued at about $140 million now. I missed out. I had too much experience with failure.
Ideally, experience makes me wise, but it does not make me bold. Maybe everything is OK and I need to relax, accept the tremendous future, and stay out of the way. But I am stuck with my experiences and I read history. I read how Rome turned from a republic into an empire. I read about Germany in the 1930s. I watched the "Brooks Brothers" riot in the year 2000, then watched January 6 this year. Most troubling, I watch how Republican thought leaders are falling into line, silent or participating, as an antidemocratic Trump replaces Reagan as the central vision of the GOP.
I don't like what I see.
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