James Wolcott: We Can't Say We Weren't Warned

I'm fascinated with the stock market, not just as a money-making (or money-losing) proposition, but as a laboratory for sentiment and a theater of folly. One of the things I've learned about the market is to heed one's elders. They know best. When every hotshot was predicting a Nasdaq to infinity and beyond in the late nineties, it was the wise owls--Richard Russell of Dow Theory Letters, Warren Buffett, Sir John Templeton, Seth Glickenhaus--who warned of stocks burning up on reentry into the earth's atmosphere. They were discounted at the time as stodgy, outmoded, stuck in the transistor age as information technology made traditional metrics and industries obsolete--Buffett in particular was chided for not holding tech stocks--and the business magazines splashed one young startup stud or portfolio manager after another on the cover along with articles that cried RETIRE RICH! and FIRE YOUR BOSS!