Still, he said he gets heat from industry consultants for having too many stocks in his portfolio, which can include more than 900 names. About 200 of those stocks are very small positions, with the potential of adding more risk to the portfolio. Tillinghast conceded it can get messy tracking all of those names.

"I think of tiny positions as the equivalent of accepting someone's business card," Tillinghast explained. "I have a lot of tiny positions where I think, something about this is interesting, something about this will work out, but I haven't done enough research to make it a big position."

Tillinghast, for example, took a flyer on a small company called Hansen's Natural. Today, it is known as Monster Beverage Corp , which has grown 500-fold for his fund, he said.

Tillinghast made it clear he is not making any prediction about when the market's bubble will burst. In fact, he said he is bad at forecasting. Before he joined Fidelity, he worked as a research economist at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the Wall Street firm famous for high yield or "junk" bonds, which went bankrupt in 1990.

"I sucked at it," he said.

So he is not saying when the artificial market, as he describes it, will end.

"How long can we party with our bad selves?" Tillinghast asked. "You want to know so you can party on until" five minutes before it ends.

First « 1 2 » Next