I did something similar to your friend this year, got a nice little bonus from work (thanks to Trumpās tax cut apparently) that I used to buy Freetrade shares last month 
Editing to state the obvious here: Fingers crossed itāll pay off like your friendās apple shares did!
Here here. Iota coin excited me. It went from $0.8 to $4 pretty much overnight (slight over exaggeration). Anywayā¦ I heard something big was coming - āit was the new bitcoinā. Jokes on meā¦ itās currently at $0.9 
Safe to say iāve lost all interest in crypto - canāt do it to myself!
I think this is the central problem with cryptos at the moment. Each cryptoasset is underpinned by a distributed app that is there to do a job or solve a problem. But the distributed apps havenāt proven themselves, or if they have they havenāt in a way that makes it obvious how you could start to put a fair value on them or their cryptoasset.
Eg Bitcoin certainly has some success, but it seems to me that its job is āuncensorable payments/moneyā or something like that, and thatās a use which doesnāt seem to be growing particularly (please correct me if Iām wrong!) That job also got muddied a bit last year as investors bid the price up and everyone stopped using btc to buy pizzas.
Eg Ethereumās job is āyou can make your own distributed appsā, but again itās a bit unclear what value those distributed apps have yet.
So buying cryptos ends up feeling and looking more like speculating or betting than investing at the moment. Of course, this could well all change in time, and massively. Just feels like theyāre not there yet.
Oh and please, someone, educate me 
Iād like to be wrong about that ^
Maybe itās a good job I didnāt tell you guys about the time I got a royalty payment and spent most of it on an Aibo.
I mean, how could a two grand robot dog not shoot up in value? They sold 3,000 of them in 17 seconds! Michael Jackson had one!
Another partial success.
Certainly one of the more niche alternative investmentsā¦ 
How did you get to invest in tandem?
It was on Seedrs, and what feels like a long time ago.
Best: Revolut - 4x ROI
Worst: YOYOW, ETH needed to swap funds around lost 30%
So I reported Sound Energy Plc as one of my worse investmentsā¦ well fingers crossed but looks like it might turn into a great investment! Their last drill showed gas and they have had a substantial recovery from a pitifully low sp.
Letās see what this year brings.
My average is 25 but still a sore one seeing it crash down from 100ā¦
My average is about 45p 
So still down. I try not to look too often so I will turn off again for another few months.
The SOU forum on the LSE site is always livelyā¦
No! I donāt want to get caught in the trap again of constantly checking the price and reading the ramping/deramping.
Just going to wait for the RNSā and leave it at that 