Blog/2026-05-27/Sell When Retail Gets In

I love London so even nondescript photos of the streets make me nostalgic

Aella @Aella_Girl

I'm so mad at everyone in my life who told me never to pick stocks, that smarter ppl will always outcompete u. I could have been making so much money

May 26, 2026

With social media at full velocity, almost everyone knows someone who hit the boom on some stock or whatever. The funny things in times when the Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500 are hitting their all time highs and the space, semiconductor, and AI industries are completely booming is that people start talking about the trades they should have done. The traditional advice is that when normal retail traders are trying to jump into the market, one should sell so that they don't get caught up in the eventual correction from exuberance. While it's true that it's often foolish to just bandwagon into things, sometimes participating in a big bandwagon run works out.

The funniest case of this happening to me is when I was leaving London in February 2018 to return to San Francisco. The cabbie I had was eagerly telling me about the various crypto purchases he was going to make. The day was Feb 6, 2018 when Bitcoin was $7500. A couple of days later it hit $11k and with the wisdom of "sell when the cabbie starts talking about it", I sold all that I had. When the price fell below $3500 later that year, this seemed wise, but the cabbies didn't stop talking about it. They kept talking about it. And they talked about it when it returned to $10k, and when it went to $20k, and when it went to $50k and $70k and $100k. In fact, they continue to talk about it today.

Like most broad pieces of advice, it cannot apply when there's a paradigm shift.