When you lose big, you gotta pay big.

Investing is a risk. That’s the name of the game. That’s why, if you’re a smart investor, you hedge your bets. You don’t drop all of your money into one thing expecting it to work out, because it often doesn’t. You’d rather have incremental gains than face the very real threat of losing everything and having nothing to show for it. But that’s a lesson that comes over time, and it’s not one that comes easily to young people. When you’re just starting out, it can feel like you know everything. You get an inflated sense of ego and assume that nothing can go wrong. Until it inevitably does, and then you’ve learned a lesson. But what if, in learning that lesson, you gambled away your family’s entire nest egg of savings? What should happen to you then? That’s what happened here.