Longtime readers will remember that, way back in 1990, I made the wise decision to buy 10 shares of Berkshire Hathaway—there was only one class of stock back then—when it was trading for $12,000 a share. At the time, I was an associate at Lazard, and the one Quotron machine on our floor only displayed stock prices to four digits, not five—so I thought the stock was trading for $1,200 a share, not $12,000 a share. When the Lazard stock trader informed me that the trade had been successful, and I now had to come up with $120,000, I went into panic mode. I didn’t have $120,000 back then, or anything close to that amount.
So I made the fateful decision to sell eight of the shares and keep two of them, coughing up $24,000 in the process. That decision cost me more than $5 million. Berkshire stock is now trading at more than $700,000, and on Wednesday, the company surpassed a market valuation of $1 trillion. Congratulations, Warren.
