I was trading mainly Options in 2007 2008,
indulge me for a moment, if I can't relate the story with complete accuracy:
All of my positions expired worthless which sent me into a psychological tail-spin, from which it took me almost two years to recover.
But my recollection is of one of the major US auto companies, I think it was GM, which needed a government bailout to survive. One year later they filed an earnings report showing them back-in-the-black!
I asked myself, how-in-the-world could a corporation, that large, go from insolvency, to an every-thing's-alright spreadsheet from one year to the next?
I think it's the stuff CPAs do!
"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore." ...Andre Gide