re: $100 of Amazon stock bought in 1997 would be worth $125k today

Startup stocks are highly volatile to say the least. Even if it goes up you need to know when to cash out.

In the late 70s, Atari went from being a startup to being the most profitable investment in the world because they were in the ground floor of video games. By about 1983, that stock was in the toilet and the company had been chop shopped by Time Warner to get rid of it.


There was a group of programmers there who missed the window on selling their stock and then missed out when some of their co-workers quit en masse to become Activision. I believe they referred to themselves as the “bonehead club” because they didn’t cash in on either of those two opportunities when they arose and got stuck working for peanuts.