Sell well

Long years ago, I interviewed a fund manager who had done very well during the IT/dot-com boom around the turn of the century, but had done very, very badly in the crash that followed. Those were days when the current industry/sector exposure norms that limit risk were not really there. Some funds had such rules, most probably did not. Even those that did got tempted and violated them when the going in IT got too lucrative to ignore. Unlike later bull runs, that particular time was particularly fraught with such a sectoral concentration risk because IT stocks did hugely better than the general market did. The difference in performance between funds that put large chunks of their assets in IT and those that tried to stay diversified was just too big to ignore. In retrospect, this was the reason that thoughtful investors learned much more from that boom-and-bust cycle than later ones. In that particular interview that I'm referrin

This article was originally published on November 06, 2021, and last updated on January 07, 2023.