"If I had said, 'Hey, this is a top, you should all
sell,' it would've been a cataclysmic event," he says.
"I'd think about telling people that they should sell
half their holdings, and each time I'd conclude that my
subscribers would be enraged. I also wondered what I'd
precipitate if I did it." Fully 50 percent of his
readers had signed up for the report at what Gilder now
calls the "hysterical peak" of the market. "Half of my
subscribers would have been eternally grateful [for a
warning], but the other half -†the new ones - would've
been enraged because they had just come in," he says.

"It was quite terrifying. I really didn't know what to
do."