[AndrewKemendo]

You mean insane silicon valley IPOs like:

Apple Google NVIDIA Facebook Intel Netflix LinkedIn Oracle Tesla Sun Twilio Adobe Hewlett Packard AMD

Something that gives you the opposite of these returns: http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/BSVX:IND

[thearn4]

If I compare that to a total market index (say, Vanguard's VTI) over a few years, it honestly doesn't look explosive or anything. Why not just invest in the total market (giving no preference for the valley), and be done with it?

[shapov]

Really, who the hell cares about volatility, when it's your retirement at stake /s

Really though, [anything that loses half it's market cap](http://www.reuters.com/article/linkedin-results-research-idU...) in a span of a day should not be in your retirement portfolio, and lets face it, most of these 'growth' oriented startups that go IPO, are susceptible to those losses.

EDIT: Just to clarify. When I say growth oriented, I mean the companies that burn through money to get as many users as possible, without a clear monetization strategy(other than, we'll sell ads).

[troncheadle]

Every company that you listed produces a product other than Ad Space / eyeballs. Even Facebook has diversified to sell something other than ads -- I still probably wouldn't invest, as their continued success relies on such an ephemeral foundation -- millions of people continuing to log on to Facebook every day. Smart money says that when I am 70 years old, people will not be logging into Facebook every day. If they are, great for Facebook! However you would not catch me betting my retirement money on that. Have you ever walked in to Facebook? How the hell are they going to pay all of those engineers when people stop caring about Facebook and the ad money stops flowing? Same goes for Linkedin -- unless they can make a very strong play into the recruiting space I would not bet my retirement money on their continued success. Based on what I know about recruiting I doubt that Linkedin will be able to penetrate -- if you want to be a personnel supplier for a Kaiser or a Chase Bank you need deep personal connections, you need to wine and dine, you need to go golfing. They aren't amenable to the speed dating model the internet encourages. They want a man or woman they can trust who can demonstrate their value transparently. But I digress.

Snapchat sells ad space. That, to me, is not a sustainable business model. Ask traditional publishers how that model worked when the took it to the web. Won't work (in the long run) for Snapchat either. I think it's an entirely different class of business than AMD, Sun, Tesla, etc.

[adventured]

> Every company that you listed produces a product other than Ad Space / eyeballs. Even Facebook has diversified to sell something other than ads

That's an exaggeration to put it mildly. Facebook is getting nearly all of their $22+ billion in sales from ads. They have practically no revenue diversification. Google is the same. So there's nearly a trillion dollars in market cap courtesy of ads.

[jonknee]

Plenty of companies that sell "real products" or that you can walk into have come into trouble (have you tried walking into a Circuit City lately?).

The answer is to have a well diversified portfolio so that you can capture the value of giants like Facebook and still not tie yourself to their long term prospects.

[not_real_name]

Seems to work ok for Google...

[rubidium]

BSVX:IND is pretty similar over the past 5 years to S&P 500 if you compare the two.

[huac]

Similar returns, higher risk profile = :(

[sharkmerry]

Isn't this a selection bias? You're tracking only the successes

[pd1]

I think that's the point, you win some, you lose some, overall you approximate the market