While there are certainly morsels of investment wisdom to be gleaned from unlikely corners, seeking critical retirement advice from the internet’s peanut gallery can be hazardous to your financial health.

Just ask one Reddit user by the name of “quantforce.”

It all started eight months ago when quantforce came to Reddit’s “stocks” board for guidance on how his father should handle his portfolio.

Here’s his post:

The obvious answer, from anybody who pays attention to this stuff, would be “Diversify!” At that age, pops was begging for trouble with that kind of concentration. But of the 174 responses, this one from normanc1962 earned the most upvotes:

“Leave him be... makes the most sense to me. With $1.8m with a close to 4% yield he is getting an additional $72,000 on top of the pension he will be receiving. I do not believe GE is going out of business and he has already ridden it down to near all time lows and we have a new leader taking over for Immelt who presided over this demise.”

And the second-most popular bit of advice, courtesy of Fritzkreig:

“While not optimal, the dividend is okay, it should more then pay the bills. It is a steady Eddy blue chip that will be around for tomorrow , there is more money to be made but; why bother the old dude, who even has a pension coming? Just be happy that you are still (maybe) in the will!”

Fast forward to today and GE’s GE, -2.24% problems have been well documented. The stock’s been almost halved since then as has the dividend. All this while global economies were expanding and other blue chips were banging out double-digit gains.

Read: GE suffers worst trading day in nine years

Michael Batnick

Even before the nasty eight months that just passed, GE was struggling.

As Michael Batnick of the Irrelevant Investor blog pointed out after seeing an update of the original post, the stock had declined 19% over the 12 months leading up to when quantforce consulted Reddit. Meanwhile, other industrial heavyweights like Boeing BA, -3.58% , Caterpillar CAT, -1.88% and Honeywell HON, -2.39% had rallied 85%, 45% and 19%, respectively.

Warning signs were there, but quantforce’s father didn’t budge.

“Watching your retirement savings get cut in half is painful at any age and at any dollar amount, but there is no need to compound the problem with praying for a comeback,” Batnick advised in a blog post. “A plan of action is the only reasonable thing to do if you find yourself in this situation.”

Easier said than done, of course, but four months after the initial post, quantforce returned to say that his dad sold out of GE when it was trading at $18, which means holding on past the original post cost him about half a million dollars.