Dot-Com Million-Dollar Losses

A story about how James Altucher lost his fortune through poor investment decisions during the dot-com crash, culminating in the events of 9/11.

"I was losing about $1 million a week in the summer of 2000. I didn't know what I was doing. It wasn't even that I didn't know how to invest - I didn't understand risk, money management, I really didn't understand anything about investing. I was an idiot.

I went to zero by around mid-2001. I was desperately putting up my apartment for sale because maybe I would have some money left after stopping my mortgage payments. I lived three blocks from the World Trade Center, and we were getting an offer on September 11th. Of course, many worse things happened that day than me not getting an offer on my house, but 9/11 happened and we couldn't sell then because we were part of the crime scene.

I was at the World Trade Center that morning. The Duane Street fire station - 100% of those firefighters who went to the World Trade Center that morning died. That kind of clinched me losing everything because I had been invested in the stock market that morning and everything went to zero after that. I was just desperate for like a year and a half - couldn't sell the place, there were no jobs, I had no friends anymore.

I had to teach myself how to invest, so I wrote software where I took every piece of data about every single stock since World War 2 and looked for patterns. I would try to model fear and greed in the markets. It worked pretty well and that kept me alive. That's how I started learning about investing, bit by bit."