What has been your best investment % gain to date?

And would you pursue ones like it in the future or was it more of a one-off?

130% gained on a condo I'm selling and had for only 3 years. It's definitely more of a one-off. I did it because at the time I bought, I was a young guy only out of school for a couple of year and I was single. I wanted something that I could eventually sell when and if I got married, so I could then get a house for a family. I'm getting married in about a month, so the condo goes. This is a rarity and I generally would shy away from real-estate investing unless you know for sure it's going to be a safe bet. (See "Financial Crisis of 2007-2010")

Myself

100% gain

This is from an investment club I'm part of, our best stock performance is Under Armor, bought in 2011 and sold in 2016 for an 800% profit, just before the stock tanked.  

We had great timing on this as we got in just as it was starting to become popular.  Then everyone else started to take notice and pumped the price way up, beyond what it was really worth and we dumped it before everyone else realized it was overpriced.  Any time a P/E gets over about 30 I get nervous, and it was running around 100.

TNSparky said:

130% gained on a condo I'm selling and had for only 3 years. It's definitely more of a one-off. I did it because at the time I bought, I was a young guy only out of school for a couple of year and I was single. I wanted something that I could eventually sell when and if I got married, so I could then get a house for a family. I'm getting married in about a month, so the condo goes. This is a rarity and I generally would shy away from real-estate investing unless you know for sure it's going to be a safe bet. (See "Financial Crisis of 2007-2010")

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Yeah, that is pretty lucky.  I bought my house in 2002 and am now selling it for 30% less than I paid.

verizon has been a steady creeper that pays generous dividends.  Disney has been going up up up since it bought starwars and also pays nice dividends.  

I did really good on CAT (Caterpillar) and GE a few years ago, but was absolute luck.  I made something like 60% on each before I bailed.  I'm out of individual stocks at the moment, but I hear ATT and Verizon are doing pretty good.  Mutual funds are doing 6-7%.  Slow and steady I guess...

Mr snick lost on Cat!  He didn't bail soon enough.

I'm up a bit over 50% on AAPL.  I bought it at around $92 back in 2014 and almost bought some more after the pull back last year but didn't.  This year has been pretty good so far.

I mainly bought it because my wife loves Apple products and it's easy to notice how many people are using iphones.  

snickerd3 said:

verizon has been a steady creeper that pays generous dividends.  Disney has been going up up up since it bought starwars and also pays nice dividends.  

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We hold VZ and DIS as well.  VZ has been averaging about 9% gain per year for us while DIS has been around 20%

mudpuppy said:

We hold VZ and DIS as well.  VZ has been averaging about 9% gain per year for us while DIS has been around 20%

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I've always sort of been curious on how much this does for your AGI per year. Do you really notice a difference or is it more of a rainy day fund? I've thought about investing, but really don't have the time to research it as I do consulting engineering on the side and also have the computer business. Both of which are actually fairly decent rainy day funds.

knight1fox3 said:

I've always sort of been curious on how much this does for your AGI per year. Do you really notice a difference or is it more of a rainy day fund? I've thought about investing, but really don't have the time to research it as I do consulting engineering on the side and also have the computer business. Both of which are actually fairly decent rainy day funds.

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Outside of my retirement accounts I just dabble with trading, so I only have a total of around $25k in taxable accounts, and yeah I consider it kind of a rainy day fund.  But I use the things I learn from this in my retirement account trading as well, and there lately I've been making $30k-50k or more per year.  Of course eventually there will be a market downturn and I'll lose money, but I plan to be well positioned to buy more stocks at that point.

I hope before I retire to be making more in investing than I do from my day job.  But it's like anything else worthwhile--it takes time and effort to be productive, but I happen to enjoy doing it.  Generating income from a side business is similar and can be just as profitable--just seems like a lot of work to me .

Best holdings right now:  Starbucks: 250% of purchase price, NVidia: 335% or purchase price, Cognex Corporation: 407% of purchase price.

Best one in recent memory that I cashed out of was Smith & Wesson.  Tripled my money on them in a relatively short time but sold them right after the election (Trump isn't nearly as good at selling guns as his predecessor.).

My biggest was that I managed to walk away from the '98-'00 tech bubble with a whale of a capital gains bill and an airplane.  I don't expect to see 400+% gains in under 6 months ever again.