Sound money

A friend writes:

If you had bought $1000.00 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00.
With Enron, you would have $16.50 of the original $1000.00.
With Worldcom, you would have less than $5.00 left.
If you had bought $1000.00 worth of Budweiser beer, no the stock, one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the 10 cent deposit, you would have $214.00.

My current investment advice is to drink heavily and be sure to recycle.

I don't know if she lifted that from someplace else, but there it is.

As somebody who has been employed at a high tech company almost continuously throughout the dot-bust, I can tell you from personal experience that it's all dumb luck. Whether you have a job, or whether you've gone for a year without one; whether you made any money on all those vaunted stock options, or wiped your butt with them -- sheer luck.

At one company, I managed to be there at just the right time so that my options were actually worth something for a few months, and I cashed in a little bit before the stock (and the whole sub-sub-industry niche, namely B2B) went into the toilet. At all the other companies I worked at, including one where I stayed for five years, my options were never worth a dime. Now I've had my present job for almost 18 months, surviving at least one layoff, while thousands of smarter and more technical people are scraping by. Nothing to do with me -- just sheer dumb luck.