Money manager Barry Ritholtz asked on Twitter last week: "What was your worst trade?" He admitted he still regrets selling Apple after quickly tripling his money back in the early 2000s.

Some wonderfully awful confessions followed – a $250,000 bet on pets.com; buying Blockbuster Video and holding until bankruptcy; buying Cisco a month before the dotcom bust; shorting in 2006, two years before the crash; shorting Tesla; buying Nvidia at $125 when your wife wanted you to buy it at $5; riding Nokia to the moon "and all the way back to a crash landing".

Many were examples of people selling too early, the most memorable coming from Ritholtz's colleague Michael Batnick.

"I put $10,000 into Amazon in 1997," said Batnick. "I sold it in 1997."