I saw an interesting thing happen in 2000: the public press was BUY BUY BUY but the people I knew in it were shellshocked. A friend of mine was a Symbian developer for RealNetworks back in 2000. I asked him how Real was doing. "Terrible," he said. "We're the only dotcom that's actually profitable right now. Our earnings report came out last week and we actually posted a dividend. But it was a marginally smaller dividend than Moody's predicted so our stock dropped twenty points." I had another friend at Go2Net. He was psyched because his strike price was $80 and the stock was at $130. The fact that Go2Net was not making money and never would seemed immaterial. Two months later Infospace (who?) bought them for $2.4 billion. Six months after that they were gone. My buddy never exercised his options. He flies helicopters on Kauai now.

I saw an interesting thing happen in 2007: Publicly the housing market was BUY BUY BUY but the real estate blogs were so fucking gonzo at the impending bubble that they were posting Slayer videos'n'shit. My victory: I got a friend out of his tract for $5k less than what he paid for it. Six months later the development was 20% occupied and selling prices were about 55% of peak.

Now - I'm certainly a victim of selective bias. And I tend to follow macroeconomists far more than stock pickers. Rationalist pundits probably get an undue amount of my attention because they speak to what I know and understand, not because they're inherently smarter. For that matter, John Mauldin has been predicting a crash for about two years now but things keep going up.

But I'm starting to get itchy.