alt Hacker NewsThis is the definition of survivorship bias. There are a ton of tech stocks that you would have lost your shirt on had you invested in them just prior to the crash.
Even if you invested in a company that ultimately became a winner, you'd need to be able to hold on to it throughout the correction. You put your savings in tech stocks, the tech sector undergoes a significant correction, the stocks dive, you get laid off because you also work in tech and now you have to liquidate your stocks to meet your obligations. (Or you just retire at the wrong time.)
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To spell out my thinking more completely: Yes, I did not mean AskJeeves specifically, I meant broad investment. And likewise nobody should go all in on just SpaceXSI or whatever.
And in any case no, you should not pour your money into tech stocks if you need that money to eat, that was true then as it is today.
> This is the definition of survivorship bias. There are a ton of tech stocks that you would have lost your shirt on had you invested in them just prior to the crash.
Which is why you buy an index, rather than try pick individual stocks.
Right, people often look to companies like Intel, AMD, Nvidia and think 'If only I held!'
They don't look at 3DFX, Transmeta, Centillium, Virata, or the numerous other companies because they are dead in the graveyard of failed companies that have lost full valuation.
Depending on how much you invest in each, if you panic-buy/sell, etc changes all that. You're also ultimately betting on whether or not there will ever be another bubble/hype in the industry, and that you are betting wide enough into fully speculative companies like Nvidia instead of just aiming for power players. People forget that the market for luxury PC hardware barely existed at the time and was populated by a very small group of wealthy consumers. Expecting that to take off against the cheap prices of console offerings and against the technical know-how of assembling/disassembling PCs is closer to faith than any rationale.
Just by law of probability and total number of actual bagholders, the vast majority of people didn't bet that way. But I guess if you think you're special or have some lucrative insight into the industry, you might think you're an exception to that rule.