Yes, if you only invest in winners you'd be very rich! Which companies will be the winners though? Nobody knows.

What about the hundreds of losers that looked good right before the burst? My coworker retells a story where he dumped his life savings in dotcom companies that went to zero.

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Terr_ 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'd start from a slightly more-charitable assumption which ends up in a slightly different "Hold up that's a little optimistic" territory.

1. Yes, if someone generally invested in "dot-com stocks" before that crash--covering both winners and losers--they might today have a surprising amount of (potential) dollars.

2. However much of that impressive-looking sum would be just because of 25-30 years in the market.

3. So we need to scale that "very rich" against someone putting the same money into an total-stock market index fund back then, which may not make it look nearly as impressive.

	▲	2OEH8eoCRo0 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I could have been more charitable. I think their key word was "big" tech. The blue chips. What were the tech blue chips before the dotcom crash? Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, IBM, Oracle, Etc. Some might call Enron blue chip. I think their point mostly holds though. If you'd have invested in the blue chips and held you'd likely do well.

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mjr00 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is pretty much why the best financial advice for 99.99% of people is "stick with index funds".

Yeah you won't get extremely lucky and 200x your money because you bought NVidia a decade ago, but you also won't lose all your money because you bought Enron.

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pmg101 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Does this advice still hold once 99.99% of people are invested in index funds?

	▲	Espressosaurus 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It’s not clear yet. Index funds are now an enormous part of the market and players are starting to play them (see SpaceX, and given the door they opened OpenAI and Anthropic to follow).
	▲	shigawire 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		And big tech is a large part of most indexes
	▲	mjr00 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I mean probably? It's still a much lower-risk strategy compared to investing in individual stocks.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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TremendousJudge 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

what? you mean that all my beenz.com stock is worth nil?? but it's an online currency! it's the future!

	▲	toast0 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hey, at least Flooz was used by a crime syndicate. That's market validation.