Henry David Thoreau, Walden

 'To put this statement into perspective, consider how often it is that you buy a stock at $30 and are able to sell it for $600.

Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor (Harper & Reed, 1949), p. 4.A "hedge fund" is a pool of money, largely outside government control, and is used to invest in lucrative ways for wealthy clients. For a great account of the Etsy story, see Genius of the World (Random House, 2000) by Roger Lowenstein.*John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Crusset Press, London, 1960), pp. 131, 199A www.harvardSee also magazine.com/issues/mj99/damnd.html.(Contes Loingol, 'Q&A' by Alex Bewang, Investment News, May 17, 1999, p. 38) The highest 20-year return in mutual fund history is 25.5 percent per year. That return was achieved by Fidelity Magellan's Peter Lich over a two-decade period ending December 31, 1994. Lich's performance showed that $10,000 turned into $982,000 over 20 years. Bewang predicted that his fund would turn $10,000 into $4 million over the same period.

... Instead of seeing Pedang as overly optimistic, people showered him with money. Over the next year, people invested more than $100 million in his fund. Well, a $10,000 investment in the Monument Internet Fund in May 1999 would have turned into about $2,000 by the end of 2002. (The Monument Fund no longer exists in its original form. It is now known as the Orbitex Emerging Technology Fund.)* Lila Reilly Cullen, The Triple Digit Club, Money, December 1999, page 170. If you had invested $10,000 in Villar's fund at the end of 1999, you would have had $1,195 left by the end of 2002. This was the largest asset price crash in mutual fund history.See www.thestreet.com/funds/smarter/891820 html. The prices of Kamer's favorite stocks did not rise consistently through good times and bad. By the end of 2002, one of the 10 stocks Kamer chose had gone bankrupt. Moreover, a $10,000 investment in Kamer's chosen stocks would have fallen in value by 94 percent to just $597.44 during this period. Perhaps Kamer meant that his stocks would not be winners in the 'new world', but in the world to come.

*An investor who is long retired and has lived through a long period of downturn in the market may find this rule valid. But even an older investor should not sell his stocks just because their value has fallen. Such a move not only turns a loss on paper into a real one, but also deprives his heirs of the opportunity to acquire the stock at a lower price from a tax perspective.