How to lose a million euros and 93 years of work in a single day.

It's 1987. My father had just sold his pallet manufacturing factory.
His grandfather had started making wooden tomato boxes in his shed in 1895, his son and grandson proceeded over the years to make wooden herring and oyster barrels, and taking on more staff.
In the end it was a well oiled modern factory manufacturing pallets for multinationals such as Schlumberger, employing 200 people. My father sold it in 1986 for about a million euro. Note that a brand new VW Golf cost 7500 Euro, an appartment 40.000 euro and a liter of gas cost 0,6 euro back then. So he went with his money to ABN Amro where they put the most of it in various bonds. But 'actively' traded with 10% of it, mostly in options. As so in the week from 11 till 16 october 1987. He was short long dated puts and long the shorter dated puts as a hedge. His hedge: the long puts, expired friday the 16th, so he called his advisor, who said, we'll buy them back cheaper on monday.
But monday became know in the history books as 'Black Monday' the stock markets crashed. So the short put position, which is like a written insurance policy against market losses, had huge losses. So ABN AMRO sold the 'safe' investment in bonds, just so they wouldn't have any losses.
The sweat of 3 generations wiped out in a single day.
That father sat in tears in his Jaguar V12 that morning as he dropped me off at school and the only thing he said was: 'Pay good attention in school today, because an education is the only thing I can give you.' I was fifteen years old. And so the journey started.