John At The Center

Four months ago, judging myself to be the next Warren Buffett, I logged on to my Charles Schwab account and did something that in hindsight was astonishingly stupid, even for my own very long roster of financial screw-ups. I clicked over to the trading page and bought shares of Citigroup.

The company, like most of the big Wall Street banks then staring down the subprime meltdown, was limping along. The headlines were bad. The chatter on CNBC was pessimistic. I saw a bargain. I saw a company whose credit card bills and offers show up in millions of mailboxes every day. Just as soon as the banks got their write-offs out of the way, optimism would return to the sector. There would be more buyers of the stock than sellers. I would profit.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/24/AR2008052400002.html