News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Stanford CS007: Personal Finance For Engineers by icedchai on Monday November 27, 2017 @01:33PM (#15789805)
I've had this happen with Bitcoin. It is a tough decision to make.

I have decided that I don't want any single high risk investment to consist of more than 10% of my networth, so I sell some to compensate.

Is that the right number? I don't know...

Re:Stanford CS007: Personal Finance For Engineers by marvin on Monday November 27, 2017 @02:48PM (#15790538)
If it was me, I would sell enough to have received a gain of 2-3x my cost basis even if the rest becomes worthless, and then just leave the rest alone unless there is a compelling reason to sell. If you aren't open to _receiving_ the truly outrageous returns that black swan-type events might cause, there is no sense in making bets for black swans. You do need to be a good sleeper to do this though.

The other criterion I'd use is that if one of my risky bets has returned enough money that I could likely retire from it (i.e. >25x annual expenses), I would sell enough to be capable of doing that. That's such a monumental quality of living change that it's not worth it to keep the same level of risk.

Re:Stanford CS007: Personal Finance For Engineers by Procrastes on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @12:39AM (#15794718)
This. That's pretty much exactly what I did, although it was more like 800x because bitcoin. It gave me quite a bit of peace of mind to know that even if I was wrong, I was wrong in a very reasonable way and not completely out of the game.