Retail investor: My friend lost everything in the dot com crash. Options, stocks, all of it. I promised myself I'd never touch any of this.

Me: What he was actually holding?
Retail investor: From the stories... a bunch of internet companies with no profits, & some options plays on top. Leveraged up too.
Me: So no profit companies, bought at insane prices, with leverage & short dated bets stacked on. I'm sorry... that's brutal. But notice what the actual killers were.
Retail investor: ...the companies & the leverage, not the market itself?
Me: The market fell hard on EVERYONE. But people holding profitable companies at fair prices, no leverage... they were whole again in a few years & rich a decade later. Your friends story is real. The lesson just isn't "never invest."
Retail investor: What's the lesson then?
Me: Profits matter. Price matters. Ratios matter. Everything I do... great companies below fair value, 1+ year options, sized to survive a 50% crash...
Retail investor: So the strategy is basically built from that wreckage.
Me: learn from his story, but sitting out for 40 years is not the solution. Sitting out has its own cost & it's massive.
The crash didn't kill everyone... it killed leverage & profitless hype.