It's mostly companies that do well in any market or have a habit of surviving massive market disruptions. Sort by founded date. Almost all of them are 2000 or older.
To add to this: even within the S&P-500, the better ones seem to do much better than the average ones, so the NASDAQ-100 outperforms the S&P-500.
As an investor: Very happy with my "QQQ" (NASDAQ-100 ETF) investment, but my more diverse retirement portfolio is nowhere near as good. I have recently been buying hard hit stocks that I think will survive over the long term: Disney, Marriott..
As an employee: well, the trick is to remain employed.
QQQ was a good growth bet, but so is pure AMZN. 50% of QQQ is FAAAMIN (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Intel, Netflix, with Cisco right below but they dont fit the acronym.)
Investing in Amazon is almost as profitable as a 3x leveraged parity risk bet on QQQ. I get what you are saying, "buy when people are fearful", but do you really think it will be more profitable than betting on the top 6 tech stocks?
Yeah, this is purely fear- people overshoot on the way down, you can profit. I made some easy money in 2008 on certain banks that were obviously not going to fail. The bet is that things return to some sort of normal. I would not normally buy these stocks, they have nowhere near the growth potential as the tech stocks.
I guess I don't believe in the statistical basis of the risk calculations (bell curve is an invalid model for sure for stocks), so only one stock is way riskier than you would think and tech only is already exposing you to some kinds of systemic risk.
It's mostly companies that do well in any market or have a habit of surviving massive market disruptions. Sort by founded date. Almost all of them are 2000 or older.