1) Five years ago, Ken Langone asked Stan Druckenmiller, "What is the biggest mistake you made and what did you learn from it?"
2) Druck said in 1999, after Yahoo and AOL had already gone up ten-fold, he decided to short internet stocks. He placed a $200 million bet in February and was down $600 million by mid-March.
3) He was very proud of the fact that he never had a down year but now his fund was down 15%. "I'm finished," he thought.
4) He flipped his view, convinced the tech boom was going to stay. So he hired a couple of young gun slingers who bought the hot tech stocks. The fund ended up 35% on the year.
5) Then in January 2000, he sold all his tech stocks. Nasdaq had gone up 400% and was trading at 103 times earnings. "This is crazy. This is nuts," he told Soros.
6) Druck got out of the market, but he kept the young duo who managed a small sum. They were making 3% a day as Nasdaq kept rising. Quantum was up 7% while they were up 50%. "It is driving me nuts," he said.
7) "I could feel it coming. I just had to play. I couldn't help myself." Three times during the same week he picked up the phone and stopped himself. "Don't do it, don't do it," the voice inside told him.
8) But in March, within an hour of the market top, he called in the order to buy $6 billion worth of tech stocks. In six weeks he had left Soros and lost $3 billion in that one play.
9) "You asked me what I learned. I didn't learn anything. I already knew that I wasn't supposed to do that. I was just an emotional basket case and couldn't help myself.”
10) I highly recommend reading this transcript of Stan Druckenmiller's speech at the Lost Tree Club in 2015. Now is the time to be inspired. valuewalk.com/wp-content/upl…
