I saw an interesting thing happen in 2000: the public press was BUY BUY BUY but the people I knew in it were shellshocked. A friend of mine was a Symbian developer for RealNetworks back in 2000. I asked him how Real was doing. "Terrible," he said. "We're the only dotcom that's actually profitable right now. Our earnings report came out last week and we actually posted a dividend. But it was a marginally smaller dividend than Moody's predicted so our stock dropped twenty points." I had another friend at Go2Net. He was psyched because his strike price was $80 and the stock was at $130. The fact that Go2Net was not making money and never would seemed immaterial. Two months later Infospace (who?) bought them for $2.4 billion. Six months after that they were gone. My buddy never exercised his options. He flies helicopters on Kauai now. I saw an interesting thing happen in 2007: Publicly the housing market was BUY BUY BUY but the real estate blogs were so fucking gonzo at the impending bubble that they were posting Slayer videos'n'shit. My victory: I got a friend out of his tract for $5k less than what he paid for it. Six months later the development was 20% occupied and selling prices were about 55% of peak. Now - I'm certainly a victim of selective bias. And I tend to follow macroeconomists far more than stock pickers. Rationalist pundits probably get an undue amount of my attention because they speak to what I know and understand, not because they're inherently smarter. For that matter, John Mauldin has been predicting a crash for about two years now but things keep going up. But I'm starting to get itchy.
I am going into programming, and my current mantra is "not web development". I want to be as far away from everything involved with websites as I can. All this crap with google, facebook, start ups worth billions, it's dangerous and not something I want to be anywhere near when it all deflates. Kickstarter and Patreon are big parts of it. What happens the moment people fall on hard times? They end their voluntary, month to month, payments, with absolutely no loss on their part. This kills the industry. Especially with so many companies on Kickstarter killing the trust of so many people.