What was the first stock you owned?
My first stock purchase was a little company called Mercury Finance. I was 22. My office mate, Jim, had called on the company in his previous job and he told me it was a great buy. I looked them up, I evaluated their financials. It seemed to be a deal and I sunk about $1,000 of my first investment banking bonus into the stock.

We were up 50% and I was feeling smug (and lucky) when an odd news item popped up in my usually quiet alert page. The CFO had gone missing. Soon it was announced that the company had cooked the books, several years' worth, and two weeks later said CFO suffered a mysterious heart attack.

What is your worst investment ever?
I know you're thinking I'm going to say, "Mercury Finance," but no. Only a few months after my $1k loss, my boyfriend (at the time) had a party. He got epically drunk. Coincidentally, that night, ValuJet's Flight 592 went down over the Everglades, killing everyone aboard. My usually impervious and very conservative boyfriend sobbed in front of the TV.

The next day, he insisted we should buy ValuJet. He told me it was smart, that most airline stocks plummeted the day after a crash, later to rebound. We'd make a nice little chunk of change by selling on the uptick. In retrospect I wonder if he was trying to regain whatever authority he'd lost during his uncharacteristic outburst by profiting from his emotional low. Either way I should hever have listened to him.

ValuJet's rebound never happened; the company was too low-budget to survive the PR firestorm that occurred when its maintenance record was challenged. They sold their assets to another airline and my stock ended up worth nothing. Another timely buy turned out to have been vastly un-timely.

That was the last time you listened to anyone else's stock tip, right?
No, evidently it's three times that is the charm, for me. When a group of my bosses at First Union started snapping up shares of Midcom Communications the year after ValuJet's crash, they evangelized me on the brilliant prospects of the little company with almost no revenues. Evidently, the management team was top-notch and the payoff was almost certain.

Today, I still own a few hundred shares of Midcom. I get statements every quarter from my brokerage account at Wachovia (First Union's new identity), showing my balance of $0. It's an excellent reminder only to invest in companies for which I have developed a passion entirely independently.

What is your investing success story?
There are a lot, really; I invested every penny of my 401(k) program at First Union into their stock and doubled my money by selling just before starting business school. I was lucky, that stock price is still a few dollars from its all-time high. But I think my favorite story is eBay. I knew the company intimately, having become an addict and an eBay analyst early (you should have seen my spreadsheets) and getting to know the company's management team at a handshake level after they invested in one of my aforementioned gutsy startups.

When I became pregnant in late 2001 and suddenly had to buy a house, I sold my eBay stock, making exactly enough money for my down payment. Since then, my house has doubled in value, meaning my $2,500 investment in eBay is now worth over $150,000 (not to mention a roof over my head). Now that's a return worth writing home about.

What do you own now?
I own a few shares each of eBay, Starbucks, XM Satellite Radio, JC Penney, Krispy Kreme and Brinker Int'l. The only one of those I regret (and the only one that's down) is Krispy Kreme. Stupid, stupid! I knew better than to buy stock in a company that couldn't even spell its own name correctly. As unsexy as JC Penney is (it was my husband's call), it's a brilliant success story, up over 400% since I purchased it. If only I owned more than 1.6987 shares...

What are you cheap about?
I refuse to buy brand name groceries, unless they're on sale, and I never spend more than $9 on a bottle of wine. I'm an extremely detail-oriented grocery shopper and I've been known to leave a store without buying something I absolutely need because I can't bear to pay 25 cents each for size five diapers! The idea! I'm a little neurotic. But isn't that why you love me?