Word: tech
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Chinese-American graduate student named Dongxia is strolling through what has become a springtime mating ritual at the nation's top schools of engineering: the tech job fair. In an attention-grabbing booth on one side of the gym at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recruiters from Microsoft make work for the software giant seem like a highly paid extension of college life: a video shows young men and women at the Redmond, Wash., headquarters playing with Nerf toys between all-night bouts of writing code. Nearby, the Boeing booth touts its work on the space station. But Dongxia (pronounced...
...recruits about $50,000 a year--mere beer money to many of the top science grads, who are courted with six-figure salaries and stock options by Internet start-ups and established tech firms. But the agency carries a certain cachet among some lab dwellers. "I'm interested in the challenge, the exciting lifestyle," says Alan, 30, a postdoctoral student of biomedicine at M.I.T. (He and others asked that their last names not be used.) The dotcoms are too volatile, he says, and too many big companies are "on cruise control." Quentin, 20, a junior student of electrical engineering, says...
...weeks ago, I suggested here that those who had racked up big wins in tech stocks should lighten up on their precious juggernauts to preserve what they had made. Lighten up, not sell out. Remove some risk, not quit the game. The e-mail response was vitriolic. How could I be so dumb? What would I recommend next, mining stocks? No. But how about a tutorial in market risk? In case you don't remember: the NASDAQ got creamed last week, providing our course materials...
Here's the essence of it, gang: stocks that soar can also plummet. Sure, in the long run, high risk usually means high reward, and the techs could climb anew. But the long run can be long indeed, and if you hold only a few stocks, there are no guarantees. You could be wiped out. Even if you own a basket of tech stocks, your nest egg could drop 50% or more in the time it takes to order that new BMW. Spreading investments across asset classes reduces such risk and looks dumb only to the tech cultists...
...flip side of high risk--assuming too little of it--is equally dangerous. That's been clear enough over the past few years to anyone who is mainly in bonds or old-economy value stocks like Philip Morris and Good-year Tire. Quite simply, they were left in the tech dust. Ask Julian Robertson, the famed Tiger Management boss who held fast to his value style until time ran out. Last week Robertson, whose assets had dwindled, to about $6 billion from $21 billion in 1998, gave up and quit. The question is, Is it too late to jump...