Britneek - with all due respect: Yes, absolutely nothing goes in a straight line, trees don't grow to the sky, and as JP Morgan famously said when asked about the market, he replied "Prices will fluctuate". So of course you are right - "Do you really expect the share price to only ever go up". NO!
"Have you been in the share market before?" you asked?
Yes I have, living and working in NYC for 25 years.
When I look at some HC darlings since I first joined, I note that, to take four recently popular ones, including RYG, I see, off their highs, in alphabetical order, all tech stocks, by the way, focused on Mobile, clearly the next big thing (along with Cloud, Collaborative computing, and Social Media):
NOR - down 52%
RFN - down 69%
RYG - down 46%
VPC - down 52%
in a month or so (or much less). I even won't give numbers for Australia's best and classiest biotech start up, MSB, which - one day - will make a fortune for its long suffering holders.
These are not pretty numbers especially for holders. Of course I realize these are highly speculative, but some carry on as if they too are the "next INTC, or MSFT", at least in their own space. what all investors were looking for in the 90's aka The Gorilla Game, which is still a good read for tech investors...(you can buy it for a penny, literally)
I have seen, and lived through, something like this, yes, in the erroneously named "dot com" crash, the "tech bubble" crash between 2000-2003, when the NASDAQ fell some 80+% in that timespan. And it wasn't only the NASDAQ, but NYSE also. And it wasn't just techs.
But of those techs, many were highly respectable hi-revenue, high income generating, household name companies like CSCO, EMC, MSFT , INTC, QCOM, JDSU (the next INTC it was said - look it up) and many others (new Telcos, WCOM ,QWST, GX etc., not to mention the likes of AOL, YHOO etc.), all constructively engaged in the Internet infrastructure buildup and roll out. None were dot coms by the way, and they all fell, 50, 60% or more. Even GE - the largest conglomerate and biggest company in the nation - went from 60 to 30, a 50% drop ---and has still never come back. 15 years later, still at 30 (and never a dotcom) - look at a historical chart.
So, I have seen something similar, and while they say comparisons are odious, this appears to be bring back memories. This has happened in a month or less (not 3 years, and by the way, and it took a few years to reach its climactic, maniacal zenith in USA in March 2000), but perhaps what we are seeing is typical of penny stocks (only RFN went over a dollar). I wasn't playing penny stocks like Wolf of Wall St (which BTW had nothing whatsoever to do with Wall St., but was a great movie, nonetheless, like mainlining cinema and not a minute too long at 3 hours). I believed in, and respected these companies, based on my technical knowledge (not TA). And who didn't? And people still do today. They're still around, QCOM might even be RYG's partner, we don't know. (JDSU - a Disallowed for me - became the worst performer for the next 5 years). Just as people say the same about the above darlings, and they may well be right, I just don't know. Clearly they are highly speculative, and so highly risky.
But the extreme rise and fall, compressed into such a small timeframe - you can't blame people for feeling queasy (and please no-one say if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen).
Having said that, perhaps this extreme volatility is a characteristic of (Australian? All?) micro-cap tech startups. I'm not a VC, I don't know. None of them have earnings (obviously), and few have revenue. AMZN (a start up, now a "FANG") also had no earnings for maybe a decade, but at least it had revenues, today with a MC of USD 308B. That took 20 years (since 1994).
Perhaps we are witnessing a "mini-crash" or (severe) "correction" - ironically the ASX had one of its best days ever today, and 2 of the named 4 fell, 2 up very narrowly, tho' obviously its not a good comparison - Large Caps vs micro-cap...OTOH, they say a rising tide lifts all boats - yes, a second cliche.
I don't know, but they sure rose fast, and are falling just as quickly, hence the unease.
I trust they will come back, in due course, I hold some of them, but they don't always come back - a common misconception (I gave two examples, above, of far more substantial - and very different - companies, GE, JDSU).
FWIW, my email signature is "There are no simple lessons in history, it is human nature that repeats itself, not history".
Another Poster has as his HC signature Templeton's " This time it's different", the four most dangerous words and investor can utter, and he is 100% right. People here will have seen him / her on the Forums.
I stand open to any civil corrections if I am on the wrong track, but hey, a little history (and understanding of the follies and foibles of human nature) can be a good thing. It's all we have to go by. And it was a great ride while it lasted! But, I can say without hesitation, having lived through three bubbles, the aftermath of a bubble is always very, very ugly. We are still living though the last one, The Great Recession of 2007-2009, aka "GFC". And tonight (6:00am AEDT - be sure to rise early) the US Fed's FOMC decides whether or not to lift rates from zero, held there since December 2008, surely an admission of total failure, compounded by printing some USD 4 Trillion (aka"QE") which invariably found its way to stock markets (after all, residential Real Estate and associated derivatives and excess leverage...and a lot more...was the prime culprit, so that was no route), which are, once again, breaking down. Call it the Seven Year Itch....2000, 2007, 2014..I guess we're a year overdue.....
As I said...ugly. But, I digress. But I did mention RYG (twice), so I trust I will not be Moderated out.
All the best to all holders. We all want to make money.
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