While enjoying my morning coffee I ran into the following.

If you’d invested $1,000 in Nvidia on 15 April 2005, you’d now have $566,624.

Sure.

If I had been a little boy on 15 April 2005, I’d be a man in my twenties now.

If you’d invested $1,000 in different stock than Nvidia, you might be left with nothing now.

Had you even heard of Nvidia back then?

People who do things like build their own computers did know about it. Come to think of it, yes, I built my first computer around that time, in a super sleek, fully lockable blue case that was great to work in.

The right questions to ask are “what do you base your investment decisions on?” and “how much risk are you willing to take?”

(Along with “what tools do you use to invest?”)

(I’m talking investments now, not trading, obviously, although if you aren’t into it for dividends and to help enable the company in question to function, but plan to sell your shares later, you can see it as long-term trading.)

I recommended American Eagle Outfitters to someone else some time ago, after I noticed insider trading – a big purchase – by a guy who I used to be connected with on LinkedIn (which I shut down after my LinkedIn account had gotten hacked to pieces so thoroughly that I knew I should have shut it down much sooner). I looked into what was behind that, what his connection to AEO was and what he had been saying on LinkedIn about it. That turned out to have been a good recommendation. It was below 10 bucks back then, and it’s at $23.70 now. (I did not invest in AEO, btw.)

If I look at it right now, however, I’d say that it might be (almost) about to go down again, and that it has a good support at around 10 bucks, but this time I am saying that purely on the basis of its historical pattern, without having looked into anything else whatsoever.

So that is not to be taken as advice or a tip. Yet that too is part of how markets work, someone claiming to have a hunch and spreading it, everyone else then following it and thus making the hunch come true. (That’s what target prices given by analysts are often about.)

(Key is finding the right information at the right time.)

I first looked at stocks when I was in my early 30s, temping at a large conglomerate’s holding while I was wrapping up my Master’s. That would have been a good investment. Its stock sometimes went down but always came back up again and over time, it’s always risen. I also really liked this trendsetting company’s policies.

I’d earlier looked at metal prices and had a silver account with ABN AMRO for a while. This was long before the world went online and when trading for consumers was not as easy as it is today, so I didn’t trade and held the silver as an investment. (I sold it when I needed some extra cash, either to emigrate or to buy a car and go do fieldwork in Sweden.) I think that that silver account was sparked by delivering the Dutch Financial Times as a student for a while, in connection with the fact that my main subject was geology. I often had a spare paper left.

More recently, I invested a mere 90 bucks in an ICO for a crypto & fiat banking system, on the basis of the pedigree of the people involved in it, which included someone from VISA, for example. It did not go anywhere (except briefly after its launch) and likely never will. That was my “Nvidia”, perhaps. It’s recently changed its name, which is interesting, because I’d felt that its name was wrong from the beginning. Its name was a threshold to mainstream adoption, in my view.

By then, I had already made a few crypto transactions just to see how this stuff worked, when it was still a bit tricky and complicated to do. This was quite late in the blockchain revolution, but I wanted to know about it and you usually can’t really start learning without getting your feet wet.

So, to come back to this, interesting is not “If you’d invested $1,000 in Nvidia on 15 April 2005, you’d now have $566,624” – with Nvidia earnings coming up tomorrow after market close – but asking the people who invested back in 2005 how they arrived at their decision and how they made that investment.

Most of the current online platforms did not exist yet in those days. That may have made the threshold pretty high, along with the minimum amount you needed to have to be able to invest in anything back then.

So, I looked into it and found this on Wikipedia:

“In 1992, Globex became the first electronic trading platform to reach the market. E-Trade, a company that started as an online brokerage service, soon also launched its own platform aimed at the consumer. These platforms rapidly gained popularity with E-Trade’s growth rate at 9% per month in 1999. In the late 2000s, with the emergence of digital tools, a new generation of investment companies started to appear, which began to offer services to assist non-professional investors in trading. In 2007, a multi-asset investment company eToro was founded, focusing on copy trading, social trading, and other types of trading services.”

So, the question becomes:
“In which countries were Globex and E-Trade available and in which countries was eToro available in its early years?”

Globex still exists and is operated by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). It seems to have offered futures trading and currently seems to offer futures and options trading.

eToro is based in Israel. Its app for Androids was launched in 2010, but I don’t know in which countries that was available. It became available in the UK in 2013.

E-Trade started in the States, and then expanded into Australia and Japan, by the looks of it. It is now part of Morgan Stanley.

So my guess is that back in 2005, not that many people had access to the opportunity of buying Nvidia shares, certainly if you were based in Europe.

Feedback? Let me know.

(If you want an example of a trading mistake I made that I still see as a highly encouraging example, let me know about that too.)