The Ponzi

Our Ponzi Experience

In September 1996 Polly had talked to Bruce, a sales associate, in the footwear department at JC Penney. He was investing his pension money in a fantastic investment. He was making close to 20% in 90 days. That is 80% annualized! At that time a number of investment opportunities were part of a "dot com" bubble. Yahoo and AOL were doing even better than 80%. This opportunity to invest in the purchase and resale of used computer equipement to a third world country like the Ivory Coast did not seem out of the ordinary. We invested in Mata and Macrophage promissory notes from October 1996 until August 1998. I describe what happened in a book that I wrote in 2019.

Notice how stocks were doing in the 1996 to 1998 timeframe. There was nothing unusual about making 80% per year.Yahoo IPO was about $24. By 2000 the stock price went over $105. 450% in three years! Over 100% per year! We had no suspicions about the return being too good to be true.

Our son, Brad, was skeptical. He compared it to waterfront property in Arizona. He said that might be a better investment. We did take our interest on the notes and rolled over the principal at each maturity date. This minimized our losses.

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