Very few businesses will survive over a lifetime and yet Warren Buffet says that “Benign neglect, bordering on sloth, remains the hallmark of our investment process.”

I wrote recently about how owners of Amazon had to experience a 90%+ decline in order to get the tremendous returns they did.

The only way I could have held a stock down 90% would have been to completely ignore it as Buffet advises. Otherwise, I’m sure I would have thought it was doomed to fail - as is the fate of so many companies.

I was recently reading about the Railway Mania of the mid-1800s in Great Britain and was struck by the similarities between that time period and the expansion of cryptocurrencies, and more broadly blockchain technology, over the past 5 years.

During that time, thousands of tracks were laid as entrepreneurs tried to take advantage of an entirely new technology that promised to change the world. And while it did in fact change the world – there were big winners and big losers along the way…

Nearly a decade before the tech bubble popped in the early 2000s, technology companies started to explode onto the scene.

If you had invested $10,000 in the Nasdaq in 1991, you would have had $20,000 just 3 years later.  

It was around 1994, that famous wall street investors began calling tech stocks a bubble. As we now know, this was very premature. The bull market would rage on for 6 more years and your $10,000 investment would have eventually turned into over $120,000 by 2000.