Did you know that even though Mark Twain made a substantial amount of money through his writing, he lost a great deal of it through investments, mostly in new inventions and technology? He lost not only the bulk of his book profits but also a substantial portion of his wife’s inheritance. So much so that he had to file for bankruptcy!
Twain lost $300,000 (equal to $8,058,462 today) on the Paige typesetting machine. He also had a publishing house that went broke trying to sell a biography of Pope Leo XIII.
His state of affairs turned for the better after he befriended the financier Henry Rogers, a principal of Standard Oil, who helped him completely reorganize his personal finances.
If he were alive today, we would’ve advised Twain that just because you are good at one thing, it doesn’t mean that your expertise automatically translates to investing money. He would have loved StockViz for that advise. And Tom, Huck and Joe Harper would have had all the time in the world to be the pirates that they wanted to be!
