http://kevinoefelein.com I hate to brag, and I hate to say I told you so, but I just can’t help it. What am I talking about? AAPL: Apple Inc. You know, the makers of the iPod and the iPad and iPhone. Yeah those guys. Back on September 24th the stock was trading around 690 and I said to short it. Well today, it’s at 638, down 52 points or around 7.5%. Anyway, that’s not important at all. I didn’t short the stock myself and I didn’t sell any shares. It was academic and meaningless… But it was for a point. My point was that you should run away from the bandwagon as fast as possible. Every time. You see, it was on that morning that I read a report with some statisticians saying the AAPL was going to increase 50% in stock price and be the first trillion dollar company in world history. And I said it was time to sell to get away from the nearly always wrong bandwagon. Anyway, conventional wisdom is almost always wrong. The band wagon is consistently a bad thing. Except for in one case. When you’re leading the bandwagon. Then it’s all sunshine and puppy dogs. When you lead the bandwagon, you make the moves, you set the trends, and you command the big bucks. They say it’s lonely at the top, but they lie. It’s lonely everywhere but the top, and God forbid you’re down, you’ll find no shortage of people looking to kick you. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is this… I had a couple of flashbacks to the past this morning; both band wagon related. The first was to my junior high and high school days when Michael Jordan was winning 6 championships in 8 years. At the time, everyone I knew was a Bulls fan, and I hated it and them (Knicks fan here). That’s right. Everyone and their mother were Bulls fans. But guess how many are still? NONE! That’s bandwagon mentality. Last flashback… It’s 2003. The Yankees are in the Series with the then Florida Marlins. The Marlins won the World Series in ‘97, then went on to dismantle the team. Anyway, they’re playing the Yanks and all my college football friends from Florida suddenly transformed into Marlins fans…. Overnight. And these are college athletes and sports fans, and you know what? Not one of them could name one player on the Marlins. But they sure were all rooting pretty hard for them. And that’s the bandwagon mentality. When you’re on top and leading the bandwagon, life is good. But don’t ever find yourself following a bandwagon. It’ll lead you straight to the bottom. Just some food for thought.