Actually, I was worse than broke. On top of losing all of my money, I was also in debt more than $22,000… so I had a negative net worth.

That was an astronomical sum for me at the time, and I thought I'd never recover.

I wrote about this a few months ago, explaining how I had borrowed money through a bank loan that was secured against my future earnings as an Army officer.

And then, without any real knowledge or training, I dumped the entire amount in the stock market, pretty much at the peak of the dot-com bubble.

At first I had a couple of small wins. I was daytrading popular Internet stocks like Yahoo, moving in and out of positions sometimes in as little as a few minutes.

For example, I would buy 1,000 shares of a company at $20, and then immediately sell if the stock price went up by 5 cents.

Doing so would net me about $30 after commission, and every time I made money it only reinforced my own arrogant conviction that I was a highly skilled investor.