What actually happened to people who did this.
4 recorded cases — each one sourced, dated, and paired with the thing it actually demonstrates. Every story ends with the lesson it is normally used to sell, and the lesson it will genuinely bear. Those are rarely the same.
Why this section argues with itself
The winners wrote the record
A secretary who held one 1935 company for seventy-five years gets an obituary. The identical secretary whose employer went bust does not, and you will never read about her. Every collection like this one is built from the survivors. Saying so on each page is the only honest way to publish it.
Decisions, not outcomes
Several people here did something sensible and lost; several did something reckless and won. Grading a decision by what happened afterwards is the most common error in investing, and these stories are arranged to make it harder.
Sourced or not published
These are claims about real, named people. Every one carries a link to a filing, a court record, a regulator's report or contemporary reporting. One story was cut from the first draft because its famous figure traced only to blogs quoting each other.
The quiet compounders
The janitor with an $8 million portfolio
His friends knew he held his coat together with safety pins. Nobody knew about the filing cabinet.
The social worker who spent his life around children with nothing
He patched his shoes with duct tape and bought lunch from the supermarket clearance shelf. He left eleven million dollars.
The man who read the Financial Times in the bins
The town knew him as Tin-Can Curt. He collected bottles by day and studied markets at the library.
He bought a thousand dollars of Walgreens and bought a nature reserve
He held the shares for about seventy years and then turned them into four hundred acres of wilderness.