I also didn't buy Tesla at $250 last year, because i would have had the minor inconvenience of transferring my 401k to a full brokerage.
Believe you me, being foolish is very easy.
1. I need the money for something that isn't frivolous. (ie: house down payment, retirement income, etc...)
2. I found another equal or better investment I will put the proceeds into immediately.
3. Something has fundamentally changed about the company or it's market that calls into question it's future prospects beyond regular market competition.That right there's the problem, see. By then, it's usually well past the ideal time to sell.
Look at Nokia for example. From the day the iPhone was announced you could have sold at almost any time in the next 1.5 years and come out ahead vs acting immediately. Initially the market thought the iPhone was positive for Nokia, it took that long for people to realize it would be their demise.
When the iPhone came out I knew Apple would own the future, I could feel it in my bones not only because their software technology was so ridiculously far in advance of everyone else, but because none of their competitors except Google even seemed aware what was happening or why and Google at the time wasn't even in the game yet. A lot of my friends thought I was going a bit crazy, I was so sure Apple was going to utterly own the future. I was entranced by the early iPhones, they felt like something out of Star Trek except even better. Maybe part of it was I always hated mobile phones, they were so clunky and ugly and the tech was so primitive. The iPhone felt like an advanced graphics workstation in an era of teletype terminals.
The problem was I was recently married, had two kids and we'd just bought our first house at a huge financial stretch, and had no spare savings whasoever. We were practically living hand to mouth. When we did have spare savings 6 or 7 years later I did consider buying some APPL, but I thought most of the opportunity cost had already passed and Android seemed to be catching up at last. Dumb.
But honestly, imagine what today would be like if Andy Rubin hadn't immediately ditched their plans for Android to be a BlackBerry clone and switched tracks to cloning the iPhone. Microsoft genuinely didn't get it. They took 3 years to even realise there was a problem.
Sorry, ranting, but thinking about this really triggered memories from that era.
You have the full spectrum of opinions on what will happen and why for pretty much every non-trivial topic. It's the power of hindsight that lets you select the correct ones and maybe even assume that it was indeed trivial, all the information was out there.
Would you bet your life savings on that one person who predicts against the trend? That's not dumb, it's realistic and cautious. In some situations the risk isn't worth it.
It is generally safe to assume, baring strong evidence to the contrary, that a large dominant incumbent will fail to adapt in the face of fundamental change to an industry brought by a new entrant.
That there are still large groups of people that take the other side of this assumption is surprising to me. The most recent prominent example is everyone out there saying that incumbent car companies are going to out complete Tesla in electric or self driving cars. That view seems to be on the verge of being undeniably wrong.
That wasn't a ridiculous idea at all at the time. The lack of tactile feedback was (and is) a legitimate industrial design concern, and it had a learning curve that was difficult for many people.[1] I had many customers at the time who demanded continued support for their blackberries because of the difficulty they had with the iPhone keyboard. Heck, even I chose to go with an HTC device that had a hard keyboard, because I found it easier.
Everyone now finds modern on-screen keyboards to be intuitive, partially because they've improved and they're larger, but also because people understand how they work. At the time of the iPhone launch, people didn't understand auto-correct or how they didn't have to worry about how their thumbs were larger than the keys.
Even Jobs himself admitted there was a learning curve: "Once you learn to trust the keyboard, it’s a better keyboard."[0]
Well, guess who lost everything on a margin call in 2009. Wall Street found a way to !@$#^ me. Just looked, current price four and a half million. :-/
Unless this is your only income or something.
Was given a single, paper share of Apple stock in 2000 on my 21st birthday. Worth maybe $24? Lost it and forgot about it. Found it in the Summer of 2013 and excitedly cashed it in for TSLA, which was around $117. Today, those 7 shares are now hovering around $10k in value and represents my only stocks of any kind. Here's hoping the momentum continues.