One person who avoided this was Mark Cuban, who bought a bunch of Yahoo! put options when broadcast.com was acquired, hedging himself against the stock crash.
If you read Mark's story, it's clear that he was aware of what was happening at the time but didn't drink the kool-aid, while if you look at the other dot bombs, they definitely thought the world was changing and the rules had changed.
"Read his story" --> Can you provide a link to this particular story? I would be interested to read it.
What it seemed like to me reading over the stories of Mark Cuban was that he realized (with the help of some frugal advisors) that he just made a ton of money on paper and didn't want to lose out transferring that into real actual dollars in the bank. It just seemed he had different goals than everyone else: everyone around him wanted to get as rich as possible, Cuban seemed to want to have as much money in his bank account as possible. Two very different things.
Most people have no idea how to buy puts or collars.
When you just sold your company for a billion dollars, there's no excuse to be ignorant of all the options (ha) at your disposal. If you don't know about puts or collars, you should have an advisor who tells you about them.
haha true. However was the parent who referenced geocities selling a lot of shares or a small amount? I bet someone selling under a million $ in shares might not have the same advisory level as Mark Cuban.