Just asking.. is it 1000+ btc's or $1000+ . If its thousand btc's, you should very rich guy for you to gamble in altcoins
BTC. I can give few examples. I can't exactly remember how I did with Moon and EAC for example, but I do remember that I sold 10s of millions coins while they were dirty cheap. I do remember TIPS though. Back in those days I was mining with 6 x R9 270x with 2.7 - 3 MH in total. I was able to mine 130-160M TIPS/day with this hashrate. I was happy enough to sell them at 1-2 litoshi, because profit was bigger than to mine LTC directly. Probably many people remember that TIPS didn't exactly explode at first and difficulty was pretty low. It took probably 2 months until Cryptsy listed it and guess what happened? While you was able to buy/sell it at 4-5 litoshi on ConedUp, the price went up to 170 litoshi. I think I was holding 400M coins and participated in the "fight" for BTC pair with 227 LTC. The outcome was bad. My buy wall was eaten in under 1-2 minutes. At the end I sold my TIPS @ ~30-40 litoshi weeks later. Frankly speaking I believed that TIPS can make you very good profit, but the problem is that I am working with investor and I wanted fast results. That is why I didn't always mined TIPS directly, but I think that I've managed to accumulate about 3B coins. This is about 5327 LTC x ~$30 = $159,810.
Another example is BC. I was very active on CoinEx (nickname bulgar1an) and Smurf01 (or something like it...), which is a dutch guy who I was familiar with told me to buy when the price was 500 satoshi on Poloniex. I didn't listened to him, but then decided to buy at higher price (probably ~1000-1200 satoshi) and I bought about 250k coins. Probably a week later (don't exactly remember) sold them with x4-x5 profit and I was pretty happy. I wasn't very happy when it hit $0.58/coin 2 weeks later though. So 250k coins x $0.58 = $145,000.
So far my loses on bad decisions (I am talking about bad decisions (impatience for example).. not that I didn't make any profit) are $304,810 at only 2 coins.
Now assume that I am mining with 420MH scrypt since May 2014 and I was able to mine $800-1100/day worth of alts. If I tell you how much LTC I have and what is my loss on bad decision (not to sell them) your mouth will stay open for hours. I had several bad decisions again.
While I consider myself as a good trader, I did failed numerous of times by holding coins.
I think this will answer your question.
Thank you for answering me. Now I understand you only meant "lost opportunity".
Initially I thought you really lost 1000+ BTC's which you invested from your pocket.