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I was absolutely astonished when I read today that George Gilder is launching a new fund. 

The Gilder Technology Fund (the “GTF”) seeks exceptional returns for its investors by identifying the companies that are shaping this new Millennial era of world technology.

Now, first of all, Gilder is a smart guy.  He is a technology visionary highly respected by those in the know, or at least that's what I have been told.  But that doesn't mean he's qualified to run a fund. 

Just like, though I'm a pretty good investor, I'm not qualified to perform surgery on you.

Okay, here's that intestine thing.  I've just got to move aside all this other gunk sloshing around inside this guy.  Hand me that doctor's knife, would you.  Oh, and my beer!

Gilder represented all that was wrong with the Bubble years.  He preached the religion of a new technological paradigm, where all the laws of economics were not only cast aside but were turned upside down, and that the new would subsume the old, no matter what the old was. 

But, in the end, the iron laws of economics are never cast aside. 

I had read somewhere (and I cannot substantiate this, so please correct me if I'm wrong) that his portfolio of New Economy Talking Sock Puppet stocks lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 80%-90%.  The iron laws of economics dramatically asserted itself on the George Gilders of the world, as they always do, and the end-game that was to follow was as clear as day to anyone who had an inkling of financial economic history.

In this business, you are going to be wrong.  You may be wrong a lot.  Even the best often are.  For example, I read in The House of Money that George Soros is only right 20%-30% of the time - when he's right, he's right big, and when he's wrong, he's wrong small.  In my mind, you can be wrong about a lot of little things.  You can be wrong about a few mid-range things.  You can even be wrong about a few big things.  But you absolutely cannot be wrong about the very biggest things.  Not once.  Not ever.  And the very biggest thing in my lifetime (so far) has been the Tech Bubble of the 1990s.

Every single person offering investment advice in the 1990s who told you it was "different this time" and that you should buy Talking Sock Puppet stocks "for the long-term" should unequivocally have been fired, and no one should ever take investment advice from those people again.  Now, if someone cynically took advantage of the times and bought the Talking Sock Puppet companies while they were rising 1000%, cashing out in the black knowing it was all a shell game that would end in tears, that's different.  But those who could not recognize the Tech Bubble for what it was were/are incompetent.  It doesn't matter if they graduated at the top of their class at Harvard, the Tech Bubble was the biggest thing of all the equity markets.  If one couldn't get see the Bubble for what it was, they have no business in financial services.  There are no excuses.

I view Gilder as the icon of that age since he was the New New Thing in financial markets, proffering advice with no background and understanding of financial history, or at least it seemed that way. But in fairness, he wasn't the only one.  All sorts of New New Things with no experience were going to take over everything simply because their company had a dotcom in the suffix of its name.  Gilder had no experience but what did that matter?  Neither did anyone else in the New New Thing.

Nor was he the worst. The worst were those who knew better but cynically manipulated the Bubble anyways at the expense of the average investor, knowing full well it would end badly.  They were the ones who screwed Main Street all the while enriching themselves.

But I'd still rather take investment advice from Wall Street than from guys like Gilder.

"All small returns are noise. To transcend the noise and the risk, seek outsized returns from technological paradigms." - George Gilder

Are you kidding me?