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frustration, depression, and the reaction of utter disappointment from my wife were all too much to handle.

Rather than learning from this lesson, I set out (as gamblers would) to reclaim my losses from the market. I invested $3,000 of my remaining money into a $0.06 per share penny stock I had little knowledge about except what I had read somewhere on the Web. Clearly an act of desperation. The stock languished for two months with ultra-low volumes. I tried to sell it back at the purchase price a few times with no success. The best I could do was to possibly sell it for the bid price of $0.03 which meant that once again I would have lost half of my remaining money. So I decided to hold on to it. And then it happened.

Suddenly and without any sign the stock began to climb both in price and volume. In the three days that followed, the stock reached $2 per share while breaking NASDAQ volume records. I finally decided to sell my shares at $1.50 and cleaned out $75,000 from that investment. Two weeks later, after the company was found fraudulent, its stock plunged to $0.001 per share, leaving the numerous traders with substantial losses. I, however, had gone from depression to elation. A few more investments in early 1996 brought my net worth in stocks to $100,000. With pressure from my wife, I was finally persuaded to buy that house, paying $40,000 as down payment, and while she insisted that I put the rest of the money in a safe investment, I went on to become a pseudo-daytrader, trading over $1.5 million in 1996. My investment value however remained the same until early 1997 when I lost just about all of it in a few risky trades in stocks and options. And that is when I really learned about the capital gains tax laws. I was still responsible for hefty capital gains taxes for my 1996 gains, and I had lost all of my money in 1997. I ended up using a credit card to pay off those taxes. …