[georgieporgie]

Near the peak of the bubble, I was at the gym in Phoenix, AZ. Two guys on the stationary bikes in front of me were talking. "I just bought AOL at $X today." There was a look of resigned exasperation between them over how high the buy-in was. "But hey, you know, it can only go up from here, right?"

That was about the time I started moving my 401k into bonds for awhile. :-)

Incidentally, for the younger folks, one of the interesting things about the Dot Com bubble was that it coincided with mass interest in online trading. I have no idea what the numbers are regarding the number of active individual traders now versus then, but at the time you'd go to a party and overhear tons of people self-identifying as day traders. Living through that taught me that I really don't know enough about finance to pick individual stocks, and since then I've left my money in mutual funds, index funds, and now an entirely managed Vanguard account.

[leak]

Almost the same story a friend of mine told me about how he knew when it was time to cash out. "I was at 7-Eleven and the clerk was talking to the customer in front of me about what stocks they were buying. The next day I sold all my stocks."