

Q: Why do investors fixate on tech stocks?

A: Sometimes it seems the only stocks investors care about are Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.com. Consumers are familiar with these companies' products, and naturally, feel like they're the stocks to buy and follow.

It's interesting investors have such a close affection with tech stocks, since they've been burned by them so badly in the past. The Internet and tech stock crashes of the late 1990s and early 2000 resulted in one of the largest wealth transfers in history from naïve investors, who piled in, to professionals and insiders, to sold to them.

Longer-term academic research has shown tech stocks, except for brief periods of outperformance, have largely been poor investments for most. Tech stocks have been one of the worst bets for investors between 1973 and 2012, according to an analysis by Index Fund Advisors.


A bum investment is one that's risky, but still generates low relative returns. That's pain for no gain, not a good place for investors to be, but the definition of tech stocks over the long term. Tech stocks are among the riskiest major assets investors can buy, and are 50% more volatile than the market. But despite that, t ech stocks have generated an average annual return of 8.4% between 1973 and 2012, IFA.com says. That's below the 9.8% average annual return of the market during that time.

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