philw1776
Member
I worked in high tech. NOT a genius stock picker.Exaggerated but...there are quite a few older people here who were in AAPL, then TSLA and gains multiples but probably 7 to10x would be more likely. I'd wager very few of them picked NVDA, but quite a few INTC and a few of the ancients actually were in PYPL, and some even pre-merger.
I will wager very few of those people think of themselves as 'genius stock pickers'. Nearly every one fo them probably realize a big part was luck and another big part was direct involvement in Silicon Valley in the 'dark ages' as all o this evolved from 1998 when ICANN was formed. Bluntly said, being there then provided a singular view of what the future could bring.
That made some of us bet on AAPL despite Mr. Jobs' horrible personal hygiene. That then led to an understanding of how highly eccentric people could make transformations so Mr. Musk seemed credible from Zip2.
Nearly everyone at that age never imagined that a clever video game outfit could transform anything.
I chickened out on doing a video game startup well before Atari. The other engineer working with me was a genius. Big miss. East coast VCs were too traditional to fund us even with a demonstrable working prototype.
Hit on companies like Apple stock & that was ages before I bought any apple products. Was a big Jobs fan as a marketing innovator. For some reason I sold my Apple stock after big gains and not because I needed the money either. Sigh.
Made LOTS of money on Tesla as a Johnny Come Lately buying in in 2020 along with placing a reservation for a non-existent Model Y.
As a technologist and not a marketeer I really whiffed badly on opportunities like Google because stupidly in retrospect I did not see how the search engine portal could be monetized. DUH.
Fortunately my aggressive (Heh) mutual fund portfolio and Tesla to a much lesser extend have me living very well in retirement.