I keep thinking about attending the annual Microsoft (MSFT) analyst meeting in early 2000. I’d held a large position in the stock for the previous decade and was trying to figure out what to do with it, given its fabulous run during the 1990s and its relatively high valuation.

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were both there. At one point, some analyst asked Gates a smarmy question–what do you regard as your greatest accomplishment at MSFT–to which Gates replied that what pleased him the most was the ability controlling MSFT gave him to give jobs to his friends. Wow! Later on, Ballmer answered a question about future earnings growth potential with a harangue about how hard it was to get a company of MSFT’s large size to grow at the then rate of +5% yearly. This for a stock trading at maybe 60x eps. I called my trading desk and sold everything.

When Ballmer was finally forced out of the company in 2014–not before acquiring Nokia for $7billion+ (since written off entirely)–NASDAQ was trading at about the high it had reached during the Internet frenzy of 1999-2000. MSFT was trading at about 40% of its 2000 high.

I bought a bunch of MSFT was Ballmer was leaving. It’s up almost 40x since then vs. a gain of a bit less than 4x for NASDAQ.

Why my fascination with an event from a quarter century ago? I’m not 100% sure. Certainly Trump, a very successful reality show star, is no Bill Gates. I can think of two reasons my mind is pushing this idea to its forefront. One is that the administration in Washington seems to be filled with Ballmers, i.e., very wealthy men whose success comes to a great degree from being the friends of financial or industrial titans. The second, and more important, is the idea that as investors we have to play the hand we’ve been dealt, not the fist full of aces we might wish we had.

I’ve been noticing, for example, that the stocks of some near-death-experience domestic retailers are actually going up on reporting their earnings. So maybe some brand name + distribution network value-ish stocks are not as unattractive as I’ve been thinking. Or, given the increased risk in holding US stocks due to Trump’s tariff threats maybe Japan or even Hong Kong don’t look so bad (I’ve been buying small amounts in the latter market recently).