Fidelity - Five Major Stock Market Risks, A Look Back as Sure Fire Deals

 11/2/2025

Five Major Risks 

Here is a great quote from the article.

 Yet portfolio managers like Chris Lin, manager of the Fidelity^® OTC Portfolio (

     I think there’s good reason why many companies are betting on AI-related projects. “All of these companies wouldn’t be investing this much capital if they didn’t think their investments would be worth it,” Lin notes.

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Well sometimes that works and other times, well,  not quite so much ....

Time Warner buys AOL, worst merger in history

Fed Ex buys Kinkos, writes off $891 M pre-tax

UPS does it for far less money 

Mercedes buys Chrysler, later gives it away to Cerebus hedge fund

Everyone buys a dot.com, from March 2000 NASD loses 75% of value in two years, dot.com meltdown

HP buys Compaq for $25 B, failure of the merger

HP buys Autonomy for $100 B,  timeline of the merger disaster

North Carolina hires Belichick  - how is that working out?

Lehman issues commercial paper to leverage 10x sub prime mortgages, 175 yr old firm vanishes overhight

Charlie Javice swindles Chase out of $175 M 

Then Charlie bilks Chase for $115M for legal fees! 

 

Sure there are lots of examples of successful buys but I suspect most reflect the hubris of the buying CEO rather than a great deal