Near the peak of the bubble, I was at the gym in Phoenix, AZ. Two guys on the stationary bikes in front of me were talking. "I just bought AOL at $X today." There was a look of resigned exasperation between them over how high the buy-in was. "But hey, you know, it can only go up from here, right?"
That was about the time I started moving my 401k into bonds for awhile. :-)
Incidentally, for the younger folks, one of the interesting things about the Dot Com bubble was that it coincided with mass interest in online trading. I have no idea what the numbers are regarding the number of active individual traders now versus then, but at the time you'd go to a party and overhear tons of people self-identifying as day traders. Living through that taught me that I really don't know enough about finance to pick individual stocks, and since then I've left my money in mutual funds, index funds, and now an entirely managed Vanguard account.
Almost the same story a friend of mine told me about how he knew when it was time to cash out. "I was at 7-Eleven and the clerk was talking to the customer in front of me about what stocks they were buying. The next day I sold all my stocks."
That was about the time I started moving my 401k into bonds for awhile. :-)
Incidentally, for the younger folks, one of the interesting things about the Dot Com bubble was that it coincided with mass interest in online trading. I have no idea what the numbers are regarding the number of active individual traders now versus then, but at the time you'd go to a party and overhear tons of people self-identifying as day traders. Living through that taught me that I really don't know enough about finance to pick individual stocks, and since then I've left my money in mutual funds, index funds, and now an entirely managed Vanguard account.