Comment by Aurornis

When I was a kid I told my parents I wanted to invest some of my money in NVDA after we had a school assignment to study a company. They laughed and gave me a speech about stock picking. What they said was actually good advice, but looking back it would have been a home run.

At the time stock trades were still expensive. I remember one of the obstacles was thinking that of the small amount of birthday money I had saved up, $20 was going to go into the purchase and another $20 would have to come out of the sale. Then they explained taxes to me.

None of it would have mattered if I had been able to buy and hold, but at the time I remember being sad that even doubling my money would result in $40 of fees plus taxes, eating most of the gains.