Look at the two-year performance. It rode the tech trek, but got out before the tech wreck. It hopped onto the oil bandwagon early last year, fueling solid gains in the uneven market of 2000. Down 13.1 percent for the year to date, he has struggled to keep his portfolio losses below 10 percent. So what, Perelmuter said.
Nobody can escape a bear market if all stocks keep going down.
But some can miss a bull market if they sell stocks to raise cash and think they can time a perfect re-entry point. Even in the sickest of economies, Perelmuter said, people still burn fuel, they still get sick and they still shop at discount stores. And discount stores are likely to fare best in weak economic environments. The Learning Co. The Learning Co., a maker of CD-ROM computer games, owned the rights to the once popular Reader Rabbit and Math Blaster games. But the Learning Co. games failed to retain their popularity, and Mattel ended up overpaying for a has-been game company.