An anonymous poster writes:
“I saw the dot.com fiasco falling apart in 1998.. i went short in 1999 and 2000 and made a mini-fortune.
“I saw the housing bubble collapsing last year… and i shorted the homebuilders.. made a slightly larger mini-fortune
“and each time, people who i thought were intelligent were ABSOLUTELY UNABLE TO COMPREHEND that there was an asset bubble. they literally thought I was crazy. they’d say those exact words at dinner parties.
“and the same [idiots] who got destroyed in the dot.com stocks are now trying to tell me that there’s no housing bubble, and that I should buy a house and jump on the train to unlimited wealth.
“I just have one question- is everyone on this planet brain dead? i don’t consider myself to be any sort of financial genius, but even a 5 year old child should have been able to connect the dots and see both of these busts coming. why can’t 99.999999999% of americans see it?
“not only are they unable to see it, they get absolutely pissed if you even discuss the issue, as if you are attacking their very soul. i remember taking a flight from charlotte to SF back in early 2000 and the chick sitting next to me was talking to her broker checking the price of Yahoo. I told her if she didn’t sell now she was going to lose everything.
“Within 8 months the stock had lost 95% of its value.
“There are only two conclusions:
1) I’m a super-genius and can see things nobody else can
2) Most of humanity is so fucking retarded that it makes me want to cry
“I can’t decide which is the answer.”
And another one responds:
“Being early is the same thing as being wrong.
“LOTS of people saw the stock crash of 2001 coming. LOTS. In fact, in the financial industry, pretty much everyone knew it would be coming sometime, and this knowledge was mainstream by 1997. But here’s the thing…if you move real money rather than being an FC sockfucker who spends all day jizzing over financialsenseonline.com or prudentbear.com, this knowledge means nothing unless it translates into more money for your clients or yourself. It’s all well and good to know that things are overvalued in, say, spring of 1998, but if you sit back and do nothing at a big company, when the quarterly numbers come in, your co-workers have all made a shitload on a rising market while you have passed up the chance for double-digit gains. Guess who gets the bonus and who gets the boot?
“In finance you are judged quarterly. Next year, 2 years…nobody gives a ripe fuck. Your clients and your boss want quarterly results, and they want them NOW. So you grit your teeth, jump into a rising market, and make a shitload of money, hoping you can grab a seat when the musical-chair tunes eventually stop. If you don’t play the game, you flatline while others make money, and you are soon out of a job. When millions of people and trillions of dollars play this game, markets become bubbles…until suddenly they don’t. And that’s how the story goes, son.
And another one notes:
“Lots of people knew the dotcom thing was a bubble.
“I knew it.
“I bought puts on Amazon.
“Then the fucking thing went up 25%
“I bought more puts
“The fucking thing went up another 25%
“I bought more puts
“[Darn] thing went up another 25%
“I gave up. It was irrational.
“Took another year before that [stock] collapsed.
“So, you can be right and wrong at the same time.