[quote=plm]I didn’t mean to say it wasn’t hard work, it just seems to me since stocks usually go up if you buy any stock, you should make money statistically long term. I’ve learned to avoid the small caps and stick with large caps and not sell when it goes down because it will go up some day. So if there is a market crash, just hold and don’t sell and a few years later you should be back. Buying chip and software stocks and FANG is the way to go I think. Playing it safe with large dividend stocks was a big mistake. I only know how to buy stocks and hold long term. No idea how to do options and don’t want to even try.[/quote]
People who lived through the dot bomb days know how badly things can get. There was a point in time when people though Amazon would be just another internet company that fizzles. There was a point in time when Netscape seemed to be one of those companies that would be around. Who would have guessed Sun Microsystems would invented java would have tanked and need to be sold to Oracle at firesale prices. Yahoo evaporated and at once had a chance to purchase Google. There was a point in time Apple was near death and needed a lifeline from Microsoft. And more recently people wrote off AMD and thought they were going to go bankrupt, which probably would have happened if they never hired Lisa Su. Tesla wouldn’t be Tesla without Elon. Trying to pick winners and losers on tech and consistently be correct is a crapshoot. And specifically when it comes to technology things change literally overnight and disappear. You might not ever heard of USRobotics,3COM, Ascend Communications but a lot of these companies were famous for their dial up modem equipment. They died because they failed to innovate. Technology is one of the riskiest bets because things change so quickly. If you are on the wrong side of that technology curve of a company, you could easily get wiped out and never recover…. That’s a lot different from say a consumer staples company that churns out diapers that pays a decent dividend doing really boring stuff that doesn’t change that quickly. I don’t expect people who have never see a tech crash to understand this, and maybe you will be lucky and never will.
I don’t know when the hype will be over. If I did I wouldn’t have sold. It could be tomorrow it could be a year or two from now. What I do know is given my historical track record, I am way overdue for being wrong. So I am out.
