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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

I sold my Sun stock at the internet bubble top for $70 a share. A few months later it was $7. I think of that when I see PE ratios in the hundreds for Tesla, SpaceX and other AI stocks.

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Scott McNealy had a few choice words in retrospect[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40950311

Good timing. But on the other hand if you had sold AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, ORCL, AVGO, ADI, KLAC, LRCX, etc at the Internet bubble top then you would have missed out on huge gains since then.

Your point is correct, but let's not gloss over that most of those had 80% drawdowns or more. The nasdaq took 15 years to recover and it's only been 25 years total, meaning 60% of the time since then you'd have been living with a paper loss. Timing is difficult but powerful. (Just not as powerful as 25 years of waiting.)

People will eagerly tell you that some types of investments are guaranteed to show returns over a long enough period, but over a long enough period we'll all be dead.

The majority of people who were alive in 2001 are still alive today.

But possibly not the majority of people who might actually buy those stocks. Look into statistics on stock ownership by age.

> […] etc at the Internet bubble top then you would have missed out on huge gains since then.

Only if you never repurchased.

Or you could DCA out: have a standard policy that no single stock can be more that x% of your portfolio, and as any one gets above that limit you crystallize profits. It's no different than having a 60/40 portfolio and rebalancing your equities if they get >60%.

I lean more towards passive and (total) market index funds, and just riding the roller coaster, as anything else is fairly either impossible or too time consuming:

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-co...

The top was ~$120 or so. Ask me how I know ;-(

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