When I got into this stock-picking business in 1979, I bought almost nothing but tech. When I made my first couple of bucks, I put it in the Fidelity Select Tech fund. I was tech, tech and more tech.

In 1984, I lost my shirt. I was crushed. I gave back hundreds of thousands of dollars that I had made trading.

Because tech hit a wall.

Fortunately, I discovered the food, drug and beverage stocks. I rode them to glory and very quickly made the money back for myself and my clients.

If I had stayed just in tech, though, I might have been blown out of the game. The hundreds of millions of dollars I made for myself and my partners would never have been made and I might be toiling now at some law firm, busy proofreading S-1 documents.

It left a lasting impression on me, that tech selloff. It said, "No matter what you do, never fall in love with a sector."

Now, years and years later, we're faced with a period similar to 1984. It's a brutal period for just about everything, but particularly tech. Had you diversified into just about anything other than cash, you would have lost money too, but you would have lost much less money. That's the value of diversification.

Now tech has come down so much that a discussion of selling it right here without waiting for a trading rally becomes entirely problematic. To go tech-free is just plain wrong.

But tech will rally. And when it does, you might want to redeploy some of your assets out of tech if you have more than 25% tech (and certainly more than 40%). When it rallies, it will look great and it will be impossibly hard to take something off. So use a target crafted now that will automatically do it. Let's say you're long PMC-Sierra (PMCS:Nasdaq - news - boards), a stock that I think has a fairly crummy risk-reward here. If this $33 stock went to $40, I would sell it. That type of thing.

Why bother? Because you have to stay in the game and an all-tech portfolio could knock you out of the game, as it almost knocked me out in the 1980s.

We've put together this package in a light-hearted way to say, "Think, think about what else is out there."

Now here's what we're not doing: Telling you to sell all tech now. That would have been a good call at Nazz 5000 or 4000 or even 3000. It is not a good call here. We're simply preaching the virtues of diversification, one of the oldest positives in the book.

We are also not telling you to abandon the Secondhand Fund types. We're saying that when these funds rally, maybe cut back a quarter of them.

We are not pulling out entirely because, again, they've come down too far and we don't want to take action down here.

Finally, we reserve the right to tell you that at a certain point, tech will again be investable. I suggest to you that such an event could be out in time and price.

Look, I know we're beating horses here. But they aren't dead ones. Most, if not all of you are still wildly long tech. This is a message of prudence, not capitulation.

One last thought: If you email me and say thanks for making me sell all my tech at the bottom, you will get the following back from me: "You dumb $#^&!@*^! Can't you read?!?"