Investors must recognize that the junk-bond mania was not
a once-in-a-millennium madness but instead part of the historical
ebb and flow of investor sentiment between greed and fear.
, The important point is not merely that junk bonds were flawed
(although they certainly were) but that investors must learn
from this very avoidable debacle to escape the next enticing
market fad that will inevitably come along.
A second important reason to examine the behavior of other
investors and speculators is that their actions often inadvertently
result in the creation of opportunities for value
investors. Institutional investors, for example, frequently act as
lumbering behemoths, trampling some securities to large discounts
from underlying value even as they ignore or constrain
themselves from buying others. Those they decide to purchase
they buy with gusto; many of these favorites become significantly
overvalued, creating selling (and perhaps short-selling)
opportunities. Herds of individual investors acting in tandem
can similarly bid up the prices of some securities to crazy levels,
even as others are ignored or unceremoniously dumped.
Abetted by Wall Street brokers and investment bankers, many
individual as well as institutional investors either ignore or
deliberately disregard underlying business value, instead
regarding stocks solely as pieces of paper to be traded back and
forth.