Fisher Investments on Technology

Foreword

Welcome to the sixth in a series of investing guides from Fisher Investments Press—the first ever imprint from a money manager, produced in partnership with John Wiley & Sons. So far, we've also published guides on Energy, Materials, Consumer Staples, and Industrials—four of the ten standard industrial sector classifications—plus emerging markets, a dynamic, diverse region. If you're a serious amateur or a new professional, I encourage you to read them all and I believe you will get at least some benefit from them—maybe a lot.

This guide is on Information Technology—currently about 12 percent of the money value or capitalization weighting of world stocks. Tech may bring to mind awesome TV screens, slick computers, and cool smartphones. But it's also the guts of those products—the bitty brains that make today's tiny phones as powerful as a room-sized computer from just a few decades back. And it's also the IT services that make most firms in other sectors more efficient. If you run a business—any type—you are, in some way, in the technology business.

Many may hear "Tech" and still remember the 2000 Tech bubble. One hot Tech IPO after another in the late 1990s had the world dangerously euphoric, sending stock prices sky high. Eventually, the stock supply from all those IPOs swamped demand, and prices started falling. Tech stocks grinded their way down for three years, then lagged the stock market for years. Some may think Tech is inherently a riskier sector. Not so. Long term, ...