<i>If you work in tech you know more than the average wall street trader about tech companies especially the one you work at.</i><p>If you work there, it means you&#x27;re likely to have blind spots about what <i>actually</i> drives the stock price. Hint: it ain&#x27;t necessarily the tech. Personal example: AAPL. I make most of my money these days working on Apple tech. The fact that I&#x27;ve made possibly a majority of my retirement money off AAPL has nothing to do with my knowledge of their tech. It has more to do with watching what makes it go up, what makes it go down, and a raft of other factors that have little to do with the technology.<p>Let&#x27;s take a look at some of their tech that drove the price up. iPod: no wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame. Oh, we laugh now, but Cmdr Taco had a solid point. iPad: just a big iPod touch. I said the same thing until FedEx dropped it off. New iPhone comes out, people stand in line for hours or days, Apple can&#x27;t keep up with demand. Stock price goes down. Less on the technical side, Apple crushes earnings; stock goes down (whisper numbers and all that).<p>A sibling comment said 99% of people shouldn&#x27;t own individual stocks, a sentiment I agree with despite holding a majority of our money in individual stocks. Sometimes folks are too smart for their own good, and they even if they work at the company they ignore what really drives the price because of an intimate knowledge of irrelevant pieces, thinking knowledge of those irrelevant pieces gives them a leg up (&quot;&lt;I&gt; know more than the average Wall Street trader.&quot; Not about trading stocks, you don&#x27;t.)<p>(So why do I own so many individual stocks? Because I&#x27;m a special snowflake? No, because I&#x27;m an idiot who thinks previous success means I know what I&#x27;m doing. I really should start diverting to index funds.)