A number of years ago, naively over-excited by blue sky broker...

A number of years ago, naively over-excited by blue sky broker reports, I committed a cardinal investing sin by selling all my other stocks and putting the whole lot in FAR. This single stock portfolio was worth around 100 k and rather remarkably it almost doubled in a matter of weeks (this was around the time of Shell). If smarter, I would have sold (or better still put in a trailing stop loss to lock in the gain) but held on, Shell walked, and the shares went well below my buy price.

I've long since diversified back into several other African O & G's and now FAR accounts for around 10% of my holdings at around 5 k. Not having all your eggs in one basket is an obvious lesson - can't believe I took such a stupid risk when I look back at it. But another one is not to get too caught up in blue sky fever - "if I have 1 million shares in this 2 c penny dreadful and it goes to a dollar like XYZ says it might then wow I'll be able to retire. Yes it's a long shot but you never know and I'll never get rich with boring dividend stocks" etc etc. Sure it's fine and fun to invest in high risk high return stocks - that's why I'm still in several of them - but I've learnt the hard way that a little bit of skepticism will go a long way.