A few weeks ago my 15-year-old son decided to invest in securities…

He had a couple of hundred dollars of his own savings and we added another hundred to support his curiosity and excitement.

Valentin bought shares of a few companies and also put some money in bitcoin and ethereum.

One of his stocks was up by more than 200% in the initial days! It was the Chinese company Ostin Technology Group that had just IPOed.

Oh boy, was my son excited! He’d be checking the investing app on his phone every waking hour. And not just every waking hour. He’d wake up in the middle of the night to monitor his journey to spectacular wealth.

Then Ostin crashed because it was impacted by Covid in China.

Then everything else crashed…

Down 45%! This is the performance of my son’s portfolio to date.

Currently, his portfolio consists of bitcoin, ethereum, S&P 500, Facebook (Meta), Costco, Tesla, and Coca-Cola. Everything is spectacularly down. I no longer see him checking the investing app.

“Buying stocks and cryptocurrencies is a scam”, Valentin told me yesterday.

He now wants to get a part-time job so he can make a little money and start a small business selling things on Amazon. I was impressed by his research into Amazon fulfillment service. “Start small”, he said. “You don’t need anyone else’s money and you can never lose too much as you can with investing.”

That’s some wisdom — no sarcasm. I myself never invested in the stock market, because I’ve been spending and trying other things but I made other mistakes. If I adopted the mindset of starting small and not relying on raising a lot of capital from others, I could’ve done a lot better in my business endeavors. Perhaps. You never know. But I do feel that my son learned an awesome lesson having epically failed with his first-time stock marketing investing experience.

Maybe we should start a business together.

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