when I sold shares in Nov/Dec to put down a deposit on my house.

this was pre-coronavirus.

i recorded the shares and share value at time of sale into a separate portfolio so that i can track how much i lose on the deposit.

Portfolio went down a LOT during Covid 19 (almost 25%) but is now 5% plus again. And that is the average.

Join the club, I paid a deposit in December & liquidated stock to pay the balance in March. The property is undoubtedly worth less than I paid & the stocks would be worth more. I don't like property as an investment, being married is expensive

in March!

You must have been pretty pleased at the end of March though? Think of the poor chaps that signed for a house in Feb and had to pay in April :-)

It was in France, we completed 7 days into lockdown, April would have made no difference as I had liquidated in December & January at prices significantly lower than today.

How much have you saved in rent cf. mortgage payments in this time? I imagine a good portion of that 70k?

You've lost nothing.

You failed to make the gain that your share portfolio would have made over that time. But you still have the value that you owned in Nov/Dec, and more, as you own real estate now that will appreciate and that provides you with far better shelter than your shares.

By the same token, I lost $6 billion when I didn't invest $1,000 in Bitcoin @ $0.003 apiece, in March 2010.

Next time, if you think you can beat a 3-4% yield, keep your shares and take out a Lombard loan.

Margin loans at Interactive Brokers are under 2%. Even if you don't normally trade on margin, it's handy to set it up ahead-of-time in case you ever need money quickly and don't want to liquidate your position.

I read this as the OP losing money because he had to sell in a depressed market. Eg, he was sitting on a position of XOM that was worth CHF200k when he bought it back in January, but it's fallen to CHF130k by the time he was 'forced' to withdraw it. That is a real loss.

It is also a CHF70k lesson as to why the common advice is not to invest money that you'll need in the next 5 years.

12k-24k depending on how you measure it

Stocks tend to go up over time, so it's not surprising that today's prices are higher

Profit not realised is no profit at all. "If I'd have waited another month..."

Mug's game.

I'm reasonably sure that Phil didn't realise a real loss, partly because he didn't post to agree with your assessment , but mostly because of this:
He has been tracking the value of his former portfolio so he can work out just how much he has "lost" since he disposed of it, not at the time of disposal. A bad case of cognitive dissonance, a sort of reverse buyer's remorse. Well, seller's remorse, I guess.

Again, taking Bitcoin as my example, I have been hodling assiduously since 2017. Throughout that time I have missed several opportunities to make a killing by selling high, then rebuying low, rinsing and repeating (including the obvious opportunity, when Bitcoin plunged to less than $5,000 in March this year on the back of global COVID lockdowns). Now BTC is going through $18,000. So I lost $13,000 per coin.

Except I didn't, because I still own those coins and they're worth a lot more than I paid for them. IF (and that's a big if) I sell them now, I'll make several times my initial investment in profit. If not, I continue not to have made or lost anything.

Does T know she is an expensive investment😶?

70k must be like weekend grocery shopping for a rich man like you



Why did you not take out a mortgage for the balance?

I don't qualify as my income is tiny. I live from capital gains on investments. I also don't like geared investments, especially when asset prices are so high.

Don't you draw a pension?

All taken as cash, I am 58 so no pillar 1.

This thread is the EF equivalent of clickbait. Is the OP receiving advertising revenue?