Thanks for sharing your story with us, Ex-Blockman. It was a truly inspirational read. Encountering Monk and the Den has meant a great deal to many of us, myself included, though I have been here only a month. As I read about the rocky road you have trod over the past years, I thought about my own, and how I lost my Dad in December of 2008, and then my job in July of 2009. I know we are far from alone in the financial troubles department. This economy has many victims and many criminals which have done much to victimize them.
I'll briefly relate my story, though it is not as difficult as yours has been. I lost my father to cancer in December of 2008, which left me the sole member of my family. My father had been very prudent financially, and had prepared for a long stay in a nursing home, but unfortunately he went sooner than expected. I was left with the modest family home which was paid for, and a decent amount from insurance and the annuities he had left. I am still grateful he had planned his finances so well, because I wound up with a reasonably sized nest egg to work with.
I too was managing a business which was heavily dependent upon the home building industry, and after a stellar, record breaking month in January of 2009, we fell off to almost nothing. Since I was the highest paid employee there, the owner decided to lay me off, and I was left with the nest egg from my father's estate, with which I had been swing trading with some success (though not spectacular, it was giving me more income than the job.) Well, of course, I was an amateur with only modest trading experience, and though I tried to be cautiously bold, I made the classic error of riding a couple of plays down and losing about half my account. My biggest holding, BIEL, had actually done pretty well for me, producing a twenty bagger which I was foolish enough not to take profit from when I should have. Instead I added more on a dip which instead became a downward slope and wound up languishing.
Then I heard about CDIV on the Money Runners board and looked into what was going on over there. It took about ten minutes for it to dawn on me that this was the chance of a lifetime, and I began selling off my hope stocks and went all in on Monk picks. Since then my dwindling cash account has doubled in value and my IRA has almost tripled. I am learning more every day from Monk and the rest of you, and now realize how the shorting action of market makers likely led to many of my previous woes in the market. How sweet it will be to take back what they stole, thanks to the very generous Monk and the wonderful crowd here. If fate allows, and if there is a Monkinar in Texas anytime soon, perhaps I can be of more use to the team in upcoming plays, since I exhausted my powder fairly quickly on CDIV and only have smaller core positions in the others.
Thank you Monk, Ex-Blockman, and the rest of the team, for my renewed success. It has been a life-changer meeting this group!
