There are times when good stocks go bad and they don't recover for a long long time or ever. It can happen when the company has a product that is wildly popular without strong competition. The company during it's accent has pricing power with sticky retention of customers. This happens most often with technology companies. There are always times when there is a killer product like a Blackberry hand held device that everyone has to have for business email and for all new form of instant communication. But when competition comes into the market and the product is better and the leading stock finds itself at a cross roads. Innovate better or die. With Blackberry they didn't innovate and held on to a large amount of cash when they could have bought some up and coming companies.