[Editor's Note: The following guest post was submitted by Dr. Cory S. Fawcett, author of the Doctor's Guide Series and blogger at Prescription for Financial Success. We have no financial relationship, although he did buy me breakfast once. In this post, he confesses an investing error, and in doing so, reveals the “gambling mindset” that leads investors to buy individual stocks. If you recognize yourself in the illustrations of his thinking, I highly recommend you stop taking uncompensated risk and diversify.]
Have you ever heard about a hot new company and felt the need to get in on the ground floor? What if it’s the next McDonalds? What would it have been like to have been one of the first investors in McDonalds? Or Microsoft? Or Facebook? Or any of the other companies you hear of today that were home runs for the initial investors. That dream is inside of many investors, including me.
Chasing a Home Run
In December of 1996, just over a year after becoming a partner in my general surgery practice, I came across such an opportunity. I was a young investor searching for that next McDonalds. I found my golden ticket in an article in a financial magazine. There was a new Wonder Boy in the business world and he was about to take a new fast-food franchise to the moon. He had some new ideas and everyone was excited about his future. He was about to go public with his company and I wanted in on the ground floor.
I'm Going to Be a Millionaire!
His IPO (Initial Public Offering) opened up at $3 a share and I bought 1000 shares at $2.4375 and another 1000 shares at $1.873. I now had 2000 shares of stock that would make me a millionaire in the next decade because I was one of Wonder Boy’s initial investors. At least that’s what I hoped would happen.
Over the next few months, I watched as the stock went up to more than $6 a share. I had already turned my $4,310 investment into $12,000. I was so proud of myself. Later that year the stock started to go down in value. There was nothing different, no new reports, no bad outcomes, nothing to point to for the drop.
I'm Still Going to Be a Millionaire, I Just Need to Wait it Out.
I continued to watch my dream stock slowly drop down to $0.26 a share. My total value was down to $520. Still, there were no bad reports to account for this drop. I was sure I still owned a piece of the next McDonalds and was not going to let it go. In fact, now with the price so low, I could pick up stock for 10 cents on the dollar compared to the original offering. I decided to do just that. In January of 1999, two years after my initial purchase, I bought 5000 more shares of my dream and added only $1,800 to my basis. Now, I owned 7000 shares with a total investment of $6,110. I was on my way to millions and I was in at less than $1 per share. I just needed to wait out this dead time until others saw its great potential and started buying the stock, in turn shooting up the price. I decided to just wait it out.
The stock continued to drift slowly down. Sometimes I read the stock values and it felt like I was dying a death of a thousand cuts. But my dream was still alive because the only place left to go was up. By the summer of 2001, the stock was trading for less than 2 cents a share and my investment was worth less than $100. Then something happened I had never experienced before. The stock did a 1:10 reverse split to get the trading price back up. My 7000 shares became 700. That brought the effective share price back up to 10 cents a share.
The price bounced around a little encouraging me every time it jumped. If it moved from 14 cents to 21 cents a share, I could claim a 50% growth in my stock. The value of my $6,110 just jumped from $98 to $147. I did not see the $6,000 loss or the $50 gain. What I saw was an amazing 50% increase in only a few days. Each of the jumps encouraged me and each of the drops I ignored. My dream stock would come back someday.
It Still Could Happen…
In the summer of 2005, the stock did another reverse spilt, this time 1:100. I was now the proud owner of only 7 shares of my dream stock. This brought the share price back up to the original price of $3. My $6,110 investment was now worth $21. Of course, there is no point in selling. It’s only $21 dollars. Might as well let it ride as I have nothing more to lose. Who knows, I might still make millions.
Over the next few years, it had a 40:1 forward split and another reverse split of 1:8. Today, I own 35 shares of my dream stock. In 2015, the price per share was $0.0001. Today the share value is listed as N/A.
Caught Up in the Dream
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
I got caught up in the dream of being on the ground floor of a new company. I didn’t realize when I bought the stock that there were so many basement floors below me. If I had set a stop loss figure in my mind, I could have prevented myself from losing it all. But, I doubt I would have sold because what I was doing was not called investing, it was called chasing a dream and dreams don’t have stop loss numbers.
Winning the Money Game With Singles and Doubles
The good news: I still became financially independent by age 50 and left the practice of medicine at age 54. I never hit any home runs investing, although I did take a few swings at the fences. I hit a lot of singles and doubles and struck out a few times, but in the end, I won the money game. Making bad investments need not be the end of the world. We will strike out occasionally. But, if we keep playing the game and keep hitting those singles and doubles, we eventually will win the game. Just keep getting back up to the plate. About 3,000 years ago King Solomon stated that “steady plodding brings prosperity; hasty speculation brings poverty.” That advice is still applicable today.
This was my first big mistake, but it was not my last or my most expensive. But it’s a good example to remind us of two things: one error is not the end of the world, and never let your emotions drive your investing.
What about you? Have you hit what you thought was a home run only to see the ball dribble out a few feet? If you invest long enough, you will have a few good stories to tell. I’d love to hear your story.
For so many investors, it takes a story as you describe to convince them not to buy individual stocks.
Given the increased emphasis on index funds, hopefully the next generation of investors will learn this lesson the easy way instead of the expensive way.
-Wall Street Physician
Far better to learn from the mistakes of others than to make them all yourself.
Wall Street Physician,
You are right. But many will think they are somehow different and will still try it anyway. Just like I did.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
I agree with WSP. The lesson here isn’t to get back up to the plate, it’s to stop playing baseball and own the whole league to avoid this mistake. Index fund investing does exactly that.
Everyone has been there, though. We all want to scratch the itch of picking the winner. It’s natural human tendency.
I am more convinced every day that the biggest part of financial success is related to behavioral finance. Our number one job is to get out of our own way.
TPP
TPP,
That’s poetry: own the league.
Don’t be a Cuban ball player. Be Mark Cuban.
Corey,
Appreciate your cautionary tale, thanks for saving the rest of us this mistake.
-CD
Crispy Doc,
Glad you liked it. I hope someone will learn from my mistake.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
TPP,
I am guilty of getting in my own way a time or two.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
You and me both, brother!
I never went the individual stock route. My first big mistake was to buy an actively managed fund from an advisor with big front end loading. This was back in the 80s so it only cost me a few thousand, but it taught me one of the most important investment lessons of my life – buy low cost passive index funds using dollar cost averaging!
Larry,
When I first started investing, I bought a loaded fund too. The highest load allowed. But I didn’t know what to do and the person who collected the load helped me get started in investing. I paid him for his time. I later learned more about investing and bought no load funds from then on.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
Thanks Cory for sharing your mistake with the rest of us. Valuable lesson for sure.
I have one friend that does his retirement account with individual stocks and I tried to tell him that an index fund is much better option. But he replied that that was too boring and he wanted to feel like he was involved. I replied that this is gambling then not investing.
I used to do individual stocks before I heard of index investing. It was time consuming and I had no idea what I was going. I only have one individual stock (tesla) because I bought the car and felt like I wanted to support a company I believe in the mission of. It’s a incredibly small part of my portfolio so no major effect either way
Did you buy it at the IPO? If not, why do you feel you’re “supporting the mission?”
Hey Jim sorry just got around and saw your response.
You are right I didn’t buy it at the IPO and now that I think about it, buying the shares I did really didn’t help tesla the company at all. I kind of fooled myself into thinking that.
Great point. I personally would not buy another individual stock (and I did it would be Berkshire)
Xrayvsn,
I used to think picking individual stocks was exciting also. When I realized I was wasting all my time doing it, it became much less exciting. Now my investing is very boring. I don’t even look at the accounts.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
That’s my point. If I actually expected it to boost my returns, I might spend some time doing it. But once you realize you are highly unlikely to increase returns doing it, it just seems downright stupid. Some people say “it’s fun” but I think those folks need better hobbies. I’ve got a dozen hobbies I like more than investing.
Where’s POF talking about hist two brewpub investments?
There’s certainly a counterpoint from someone with a similar mindset about personal finance.
Great story. Lessons learned from the 90s. Stay away from IPOs and penny stocks. Do not try to catch a falling knife. Beware of the Dead Cat Bounce.
Hatton1,
This story took place in the 90s. Now I know those lessons. I hope others will learn from my lessons without repeating them on their own.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
Talk about a wild ride! I was hoping you’d reveal which company your dream stock represented; I’m quite curious. Are they still selling burgers or whatever it is they do?
The only individual stock I own is Berkshire Hathaway. I don’t see their stock every trading for 1/100th of a penny. If that happens, we’ve got serious problems across the board.
Cheers!
-PoF
I too wanna know….What stock was it??? Ticker name please! 😉
Physician on Fire and NapoleanDynomite
When I wrote this article, I struggled with whether or not to name the company. If I named it, people would analyze it and come up with reasons why mine failed but their pick will succeed. So I felt it best to leave the company name out and just keep the lesson as a principle example. I’ll stick to that decision.
Yes, they are still in business. That is part of why I hung in there. A company that is still selling product, should not go to zero. Turns out the stock price is based on what others will pay for the stock, not on the value of the company. Also this was before the internet was valuable for research. The Wonder Boy did not do the things he said he would with the company and also got into trouble with the law. I didn’t find this out until much later. I believe those were contributing factors to the stock price falling off even though they were still in business.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
Fair enough. There are tons of examples similar to this one. MoviePass is the one making headlines today: https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/27/media/moviepass-service-outage/index.html
Cheers!
-PoF
Never heard of Movie Pass before now, but this line from another CNN article is priceless:
“But the company loses money when its customers use a pass, because it must pay theaters for the tickets.”
https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/27/media/moviepass-service-outage/index.html
All the time, our customers ask us, “How do you make money doing this?” The answer is simple: volume.
Physician on FIRE and NapoleanDynamite,
I made a conscious decision not to share the name of the company when I wrote this. I went back and forth about this. I decided to leave it unknown. If I told the name of the company, then people would analyze it and maybe try to justify why their decision to buy an individual stock is better than the situation I found myself in. I think I will keep the actual company under wraps to avoid that.
Yes they are still in business. That was something that puzzled me at the time. How can a company stock go to zero if they are still operating? That’s part of what made me hang in there. It turns out the price is based on what others are willing to pay for the stock, not how the company is doing. The Wonder Boy did not do the things he said he was going to do with the company, so people moved on, and I held out during the tumble. This was also before the internet was great for research. Wonder Boy got in trouble with the law and that also didn’t help the stock price. I didn’t know about that until much later.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
Oh, there’s plenty of zombie stocks that get delisted from the major exchanges and piddle along on the OTC markets for quite a long time. You just haven’t heard of them since the market cap is small. I worked with a guy who coached small biz owners on raising money through DPOs (Direct Public Offerings). It’s like a scaled back version of IPOs with less regulatory hurdles. He’d brought 4-5 companies public using that approach and all have been pretty volatile for the investors. It was a decent chunk of change overall – something in the ballpark of $40M – $50M between all the offerings.
I haven’t looked in a year, but would bet there’s at least three dozen pot related offerings available right now in penny stocks for those of you getting bored with index funds.
Physician on FIRE and NapoleanDynomite,
When I wrote this article, I struggled with whether or not to name the company. If I named it, people would analyze it and come up with reasons why mine failed but their pick will succeed. So I felt it best to leave the company name out and just keep the lesson as a principle example. I’ll stick to that decision.
Yes, they are still in business. That is part of why I hung in there. A company that is still selling product, should not go to zero. Turns out the stock price is based on what others will pay for the stock, not on the value of the company. Also this was before the internet was valuable for research. The Wonder Boy did not do the things he said he would with the company and also got into trouble with the law. I didn’t find this out until much later. I believe those were contributing factors to the stock price falling off even though they were still in business.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
I have always owned about ten individual stocks like Apple, Disney, Pfizer, JP Morgan Chase, Amazon (in 2007…to bad I sold it), etc.
Most of them have been large companies that almost can’t fail, leaders in their industry, or companies I used a lot myself.
Once I bought a stock that was about “putting temperature transmitters in train cars moving frozen goods to alert the company about a failed refrigeration unit to avoid product loss.” It was $2 a share. I bought $2500 worth. It eventually became worthless.
I also bought $900 of Borders Books (a Michigan book store chain). They went bankrupt. Lost my $900.
My current individual stocks are Apple, Pfizer, JPM Chase, Berkshire Hathaway, Micron, Disney, and Blackrock. Unfortunately, the Blackrock was $575 when I bought it…and only Apple, Pfizer, and JPM Chase are up much. I think my individual stock picking is…sucking. Turns out, it’s not so easy to pick all winners.
Based on the past year, I am going to get out of individual stocks and admit I’m not smarter than the average bear.
My husband works at Micron so we also have some individual stock there in the form of his stock options. It feels like such a guessing game as to whether to keep it there vs cash out! I much prefer index funds in general
YourHuckelberry,
Sorry you had to learn that lesson the hard way. Good luck with your new plan.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
I noticed that Cory indicated he still hit sum singles and doubles, but didn’t specify whether that was in individual stocks, index funds, or something else entirely. The key is to not put all of your eggs in one basket and index funds make that easy. I have probably 10 individual holdings and the rest is in index funds. Cory didn’t drop his life savings on Wonder Boy. It is okay to dream, but just make sure you have some ground to land on, in case the dream doesn’t pan out.
ChrisCD,
I switched to mutual funds. That is what my singles and double were. It was a very small part of my overall portfolio. The bad part was I talked some others into buying the stock with me.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
My 3k lesson in investing was when I was stepping into investing, fresh into my first real job I jumped all in and more (margin). The year was 1999.
My sisters brother in law, had thrown a party and he was this picture of the american success story. A dentist, who had started with nothing had in 15 years, everything one could dream of. He had this hot stock pick, globalstar a satellite phone, which sounded great. Everyone on the globe a phone call away.
My $3000/- investment soon became worthless, and my first expensive lesson which I won’t forget.
1. Do your own research.
2. Tolerances are different. 3000$ May be a drop in the bucket for a established dentist or 2 days work, is not the same for me, it takes 6 months to save that much.
3. Verify the research Data could be blatant lies.
I have come long ways from the 99 mistake, I still make mistakes picking stocks, it’s almost like playing the lottery.
Raj,
You make some good points. Sorry for your loss,
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
I feel your pain.
I invested $5,000 in a medical company one of my partners started many years ago. It really was a great product and I couldn’t stand the thought of missing out on the next big thing. They even had some venture capitalists from San Francisco looking to invest in it. Most of my partners (and many other docs) were investing in it. I got caught up in the momentum.
Over the course of 5 years we watched the whole thing go down the drain. My wife periodically likes to remind me that I’m not as smart as I like to think.
It also takes more than one lottery ticket. Successful angels invest in an average of 20-30 startups. 😉
Ivy,
I’m glad that lesson only cost you $5,000. It could have been a lot worse.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
I started learning about personal finance and stocks from reading The Motley Fool back in the 90s as a teenager. I read a couple of the books and some on their website. At that time, they were big proponents of doing research and being able to pick profitable stocks. It seemed to my teenage mind a reasonable thing to be able do. Fortunately I didn’t have any money to invest then, and later came across the Bogleheads website and then WCI. Been in index funds ever since, which is exciting enough for me.
MaxPower,
I was also following Motley Fool at the time.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
Thanks for sharing. It is a great reminder of how even super-smart physicians can fall into this common trap. Actually, maybe we are more likely since we tend to think highly of our own intelligence and ability to outperform averages in other academic areas. I have fallen into this trap more times than I care to mention. My saving grace is I have limited it to 5-10% of my funds. That limited the damage.
It is wise to heed what Bill Bernstein says (paraphrasing here): The point of investing is not to get rich, but to avoid getting poor.
Wealthy Doc,
Sorry to hear that you too have been down that road. But I think most of us have.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
The hard part here is knowing that many early stage investors really do hit home runs and become zillionaires. I’ve met many of them (mostly long-time angel investors) over the years. Heck, the first startup I joined had a successful IPO five years later. It’s just extremely rare and luck really is a big factor despite the early-stage hubris.
Swinging for home runs and failing repeatedly has made me much more appreciative of hitting singles and doubles in the meantime.
CSCIORA,
It is the news about those people who struck it rich that keeps others making this mistake. The papers report that someone found gold in California. The papers do not report that thousands went to find it afterward and failed. When we only hear about the winners, we have a warped sense of our chances of hitting that home run. Just like in medicine on TV, everyone who gets CPR survives just fine. That is not how it really works, but the public doesn’t know this from what they see on TV.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
our biggest mistake was real estate investment. Let’s go back to 2005…so we buy a rental home in a hot market. Get a renter..moving along and then the housing market tanks. Because no one could sell even primary residences, the rental rates also tanked so we had to drop the rent. The rent NEVER covered the expenses. Took 10 years for the house to level to what we paid for it….that doesn’t even count all the money dumped in (management fees, replacing appliances, upkeep etc). I’ll never do that again…… i just hated dealing with it.
on the other hand, we do all individual stocks, but never anything speculative and we never bought an IPO. Once we had a stock which was delisted and we had GE (who would ever had thunk?) As far as the stocks, we have over 80 holdings. Maybe one dumb thing I did was when I became a vegetarian about 10 years ago we sold MCD. It wasn’t a loss though. Right after the crash of 87, the FA my husband had at the time recommended to buy one share of BRK-A. He passed. Oh well. We never unloaded during the bear years. (most people do lose when they panic and sell prematurely). We just kept dumping money in.
Bean1970,
Sorry for your bad experience in Real Estate. It’s not all bad.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
Back in the dumb days when I lett my broker/brother trade in individual stocks I was “protected” from IPOitis by company policy forbidding family members from buying IPO’s from the firm. Sadly, that did not protect me from countless mistakes in individual securities. I shudder to think how much more money I would have if I had discovered the joys of indexing 20 years sooner.
The biggest mistake that jumps to mind was when I was so much smarter than all those Dotcom dummies in the days of the dotcom bubble. I owned the company providing the servers for the internet. That’s real. Hardware and real estate! I wasn’t going to own some company that was just based on a web addresss. Oops. When all the dotcoms went bust there was nobody to pay the rent on the servers. I lost everything. I forget how much, but I believe it may have been as much as $20,000?
A high salary makes up for stupid investments and with a switch to indexes I too recovered and got out of medicine in my early 50’s.
I suspect I would have double my net worth if I had never speculated in individual stocks, but I’m too lazy and afraid to try to calculate it.
Fun2BFree
Sorry for your loss. Glad you learned the lesson though. No point in going back to figure what could have been if you did it differently. Just keep doing it right now. Congratulations on your retirement.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
99% of my investment is boring automatic low cost mutual fund index investments and direct real estates. < 1% is in low cost marijuana stock companies that i hope make it big. It’s gambling and the loss would be no sweat off my back. If you an itch .. no real harm in scratching as long as the rest of the financial plan/house is in order!
May not be a great idea for someone with a security clearance or a DEA license to invest in that particular “green” revolution.
The Justice Dept has been fickle, both under Obama and under Trump.
Not worried.. medical marijuana is legalized in Florida, federal deregulation is just matter of time, the stocks are publicly traded companies, i dont write for it yet, unless you’re living under a rock… more states are legalizing it and most importantly Dr Sanjay Gupta says it ok! Those who treat seizure disorders, chronic neurological disorders, and oncology know its quite effective for palliative care.
probably many highly educated investors think they can beat the market and many never realize their underperformance as hi income individuals
only when one understands the tyranny of compounding they would switch to index investing-its pure arithmetic
Kenneth Tobin,
You got that right.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
I understand the point of this post but I disagree with this example and most of the comments. Angel investing or picking stocks is not a fundamentally bad thing as long as it’s a small portion of your portfolio and you understand you can (and likely will) lose your money. Like others have mentioned, there are plenty of very successful angel investors out there. If the potential upside is large enough, the low chance of success in and of itself does not make it a bad investment (read Principles by Ray Dalio).
You only lost $6K. For most people on this blog, that’s a small mistake and not a “big” mistake, and you mentioned at the end that it was not your last or most expensive mistake. As other commenters have mentioned, I’d be much more curious from a learning standpoint to hear what those were and what your other “few more swings at the fences” and “singles and doubles and strike outs” were, if you are willing to share.
Doctor K,
My singles and doubles were changing to investing in mutual funds and real estate. Steady plodding, not swinging for the fences. But it was not the only time I swung for the fences. If you subscribe to my blog at DrCorySFawcett.com, you will hear some stories of other investments gone right and wrong. My biggest mistake, cost me about $1,000,000 of my net worth. That was becoming a partner in a start up company. My best investment was buying a apartment complex.
It was only $6,000 I lost. It occurred at the start of my practice, when I didn’t have much, so it was a lot to me at the time. The worst part was I talked others into investing in the same stock with me.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
You lost me. You say “it’s not a ….bad thing” but also that you “likely will lose your money.” I’m not sure I agree with your definition of bad thing.
It’s not fundamentally a bad thing, meaning it’s not a bad thing on principle. It’s not for everyone and every case is different. As you have said before, angel investing is very risky but may be highly rewarding in the right situation.
https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/should-doctors-be-angel-investing/
I had the opposite experience (picked a winner) but came to a similar conclusion to avoid individual stocks.
I bought ~$200 worth of a biotech stock as my first ever investment so that I could learn about the market. I thought that company I picked was about to make it big. It turns out they actually did get FDA approval for a new drug and the stock soared. I sold right away and ended up doubling my money after holding for about 3 years. During those 3 years however, I watched my $200 ride the roller coaster of Wall St.
The lesson I learned was that even when picking the golden child stock, it’s so hard to know when you’re at a peak or a valley. I could have easily made – or lost – 10x more based on my timing on the roller coaster (the stock has since tripled again after I sold). Knowing when to get in or out seems so obvious when looking at the stock price in retrospect, but in the moment you really don’t know which way things will go.
I’m still early in my investment career but am focusing on accumulating shares of index funds now. I don’t have any more individual stocks and feel so much more at ease.
Basil,
You hit the nail on the head as to why you can’t “time the market.” You will never know in real time if you are at a peak. Glad you moved to index funds and away from individual stocks.
Dr. Cory S. Fawcett
Prescription for Financial Success
I had a couple similar investing experiences in the mid 90’s. I bought stock in a company called “Biopure”. They were using cow hemoglobin for transfusions in veterinarian practices and it was thought that it would get approved for human use. It didn’t. I lost about 10K. I also invested in a penny stock in a Cuban gold mine. That also went bust. Lost another 10K. These were painful losses to a new young Doc. It was a real learning experience as I gained knowledge about investing. Early into my index investing transformation I strongly considered buying Facebook at $18 a share. I told myself “no, your not going to invest in individual stocks anymore!”. Wouldn’t you know that would be the one I talk myself out of!
If it makes you feel better, Facebook just lost 19% of its value today.
Trying to pick sectors is also dangerous, although maybe slightly less risky than individual shares.
My bad education was buying a junior gold mining fund, watching it triple in value, then eventually selling at about an 80% loss.
Just buy the whole market, it’s the only thing that makes sense. Now I just buy more shares in vanguard all world with new money.
It wasn’t my first loss but my most embarrassing. Last fall everyone was talking bitcoin, everyone was becoming millionaires- you heard all the stories i’m sure. I didn’t believe em but it kept going up and up and then crypto’s were on CNBC and everyone was talking about them. You guessed it around DEC I thought I was doing the right thing buying a crypto index fund- spread the risk right. Its called FOMO, fear of missing out. Now I can say I was snookered in the biggest ponzi scheme in the history of mankind. Warren Buffet always says don’t invest in anything you don’t understand, if it cant be explained in 3 sentences its a bad idea- I think i’ll get that tattooed on my arm.
You’re obviously not alone. But you should follow me on Twitter. That was one mania my followers can’t say they weren’t warned about.