[golfnutt]

A story about one of my best friends who I met in business school. He started day trading. He turned $5k into $500,000 in about 6 months. My first job I made $62k and that was working 50 hour weeks. So, he made in one year what it would take me eight years (at the same salary to earn).

And he got up whenever he wanted and did whatever he wanted. He was obsessed with checking stocks and would be on stock and day-trading message boards and everyone was making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Markets and his timing soured. He started losing money and his position was down to $250k. Instead of looking at it as a $245k gain, he viewed as a $250k loss and got more depressed. He took even more gambles and his position was worth $70k. He viewed it as the end of the world. He didn't even care about the $70k and thought of the $430k loss.

Shortly thereafter, he had ZERO in his account. He tells me that if he had got to $1mm, he would have quit, but he was never going to stop.

He did nothing for months and just rued about his losses. Meanwhile, the rest of the MBA class was working up the career ladder.

He started working for his old man. But he couldn't stand having to be there at 9am and work a full-day and make only a few hundred a day. They got into a huge fight and parted ways.

He resorted to taking cash off all his credit cards to live. He constantly applies for credit cards and finally one somehow got approved and he immediately took cash advances. He is probably in debt $100k and hasn't worked in nine years.

It wasn't that he took a shot that was bad. It was the corruption of money that killed his soul. For him to view $70,000 as meaningless when that would take someone saving $10,000 a year for 6 years to get to (assuming interest) is unhealthy.

He is borderline suicidal and views himself as damaged goods. This story, imho, is tranferable to the internet poker player generation. There will definitely be some winners, but the majority will be remains on the sideroad of life.