Stock Market Loss Story

I mean, it was a ~35% hit to my net worth at the time. it wasn’t casual I felt shitty about it for like a month but I sort of learned then I have a bit of a problem mentality where the numbers on the screen going up and down just don’t affect me emotionally as much even though they’re real dollars because it’s not like I was going to use it. its a fucked up mentality I know and probably because no one ever really taught me the value of a dollar (not trying to blame others). It’s just hard for me to visualize that I essentially pissed away what is probably a $20k-$30k annual income stream in retirement in 40 years.

"richard_3" Interested

People are psychotic behaving in this way to get XIV

Not sure what you mean there. XIV was 1x short short term VIX futures. Essentially you're selling hurricane insurance. It's a great deal 99% of the time, but when the big one hits, you get wiped out. Futures trading ends later than the market close, and there was a big-time vol spike on roll day. XIV had to roll anyway, and investors lost ~97% in one day. A lot of investors were stupid retail people not realizing this, even though it was right in the prospectus. The fund closed shortly afterwards. It was meant as a trading vehicle, but retail was drawn in by the siren song of apparently risk-free returns. They got shocked when they realized that everything had been shunted to tail risk.