That's okay! It doesn't mean that I'm wrong though.
One of my work friends does say that if he had listened to me in early 2000, he would not have lost (what I think was a couple million; virtually all of his non-retirement savings and possibly a large portion of his retirement nest egg too) during the dot-com market crash of 2000 and the bear market that went at least through 2003. You may remember the early signs the market was flashing in March, and then early April when the market began its correction. The S&P 500 and NASDAQ indexes were tough birds,though. They had declined but not rolled over until September and December, if memory serves, 6-8 months after it had all begun!
My buddy was heavily leveraged in tech stocks, many of which had little to no earnings (earnings, not revenue) to report (with many that had NEVER reported a profit all the way back to their IPO!), and all I had said to him was "I know you have a lot of little tech stocks with no earnings. You might want to reconsider that strategy." We all saw the correction beginning, but nobody thought the market would suffer a 30-40% decline by September. The NASDAQ's 80% decline was freakish!
When my friend's margin call came (or when he learned of it; not sure which), it was like getting a gut-punch right in the middle of a high volume down day that was heading downward fast with every passing minute.
Per the rules of his margin account, he had a limited amount of time (if it's an Exchange margin call, you get 2 days. If it's a brokerage margin call, you might have only the current day) to raise cash in his account, and everything, being down markedly, wasn't selling for much. I remember asking him a few weeks later if he was able to meet the call and he didn't answer me. All he said was he was going back to church and watching sports more. I later read something about that very phenomenon.
He went into his shell for a few years, but today he'll tell the story as a lesson learned the hard way.
The NASDAQ index would end up declining 80% by December 2002, and it took even longer to recover from those lows. Many of the huge names from back then are no longer in existence. Maybe their Intellectual Property still exists and is owned by another company now, but I don't know what happened to their pension plans. That downturn changed the landscape of investing as we know it. Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, just a few of the big names back then, all lost huge and took a very long time to recover.
For you and me, we had a lot of time left to work and invest. But if you were a person who retired in 2000, 2001, or 2002? You might very well have had to go back to work all over again just to put food on the table. Just six months ago, you were excited to tell off your toxic boss at your toxic company, retire, stop driving every day through rush hour traffic, and start hitting the links or going on ski trips in Telluride. Now just 6 months later, you're taking a crap job because what you THOUGHT you had for retirement has just vaporized!
Here's why this is so important to me. If you're here on MacRumors, I consider you a friend. I don't want that to happen to friends.
I think your advice is misplaced and biased towards fear and assumptions that people cannot have common sense.
During the dot com crash I was 90% allocated in AAPL. I did nothing. I rode it out and bought more AAPL shares. It all went away. I slept well at night.
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