My parents were good savers but poor investors - you might think the saving part is more important, and it probably is, but you can lose a lot of dough by buying high and selling low! From them, I learned what to do and what not to do. I also took a nature interest towards investing and reading about stocks - it was a little bit like collecting, just like baseball cards, I liked knowing about the good companies I owned at the good prices I bought them at. And like Warren Buffet, I intended to hold each and every security FOREVER! But then the dot com era came and I got spooked. I bought companies like Yahoo! and Broadcom, which I optimistically thought would double in 5-7 years. They doubled in literally 60-90 days. That’s when I got spooked, sold my individual tech stocks and started buying bricks and mortar companies along with index funds. I still lost a fair amount after the dot com bubble burst (on paper), but much less than I might have.
By the time 2008/2009 came around I was pretty convinced that I was not as smart as I thought I was so I continued investing into the stock market as it cratered. That was really scary and my portfolio took a beating, but bounced back nicely in hindsight.
To be honest, I am nervous about everything in the stock and bond market all over again. Again, I am not as smart as I think I am, but I feel like there is a lot of financial engineering going on right now and some nameless politicians and maestros at central banks are walking on a tight rope trying to keep the global economy going. Or to use another analogy, its like watching controled burns to prevent forest fires, but they don’t burn as much of the fuel - so just when everyone gets complacent, the random spark in CA ignites a massive, terrible forest fire.