Alan and Me

Every CEO is finally admitting that they had tremendous losses due to poor risk management. I was asked by my pal Alan Greenspan to join him on the Hill for official hearings on how to handle this debacle. This reminded me of the hearing for all the hyped up stocks back in the 1999, where no one took responsibility for their actions. Companies like KTEL records simply added a ".com" to their name the stock rally from $1 to $59 in less than 2 weeks. I remember when Qualcomm(QCOM) and Broadcast(BRCD) rallied over $100 each in a single day. 

My favorite is this quote by Henry Blodget of Merrill Lynch fame.

"AOL is the most stable investment opportunity in a sector that is anything but," 

I thought he was dead wrong on this call. But who is going to listen to a baby over a 5 star analyst leading the Thundering Herd? AOL was a screaming short. AOL was an organized environment of web browsing, email, games and reading. I thought that people should just surf the web on their own. Why did we need to pay someone to take you to the internet?  Unfortunately, I let some three year old talk me out of it saying that it was way too risky to short given the current irrational exuberance running through the stock market at the time.