being the last guy

Herding is a pervasive social phenomenon. The last guy who joins the herd typically loses the most. Here are two examples:

Finance:

If you are the last guy investing in a finance bubble, then you will lose the most because you have bought in at exactly the highest price level. When the bubble collapses, the collapse will be measured from the pinnacle of herd's stupidity, namely the moment of your transaction.

Physics:

My colleagues Ed Witten and Juan Maldacena and others who created string theory are birds, flying high and seeing grand visions of distant ranges of mountains. The thousands of humbler practitioners of string theory in universities around the world are frogs, exploring fine details of the mathematical structures that birds first saw on the horizon. My anxieties about string theory are sociological rather than scientific. It is a glorious thing to be one of the first thousand string theorists, discovering new connections and pioneering new methods. It is not so glorious to be one of the second thousand or one of the tenth thousand. There are now about ten thousand string theorists scattered around the world. This is a dangerous situation for the tenth thousand and perhaps also for the second thousand. It may happen unpredictably that the fashion changes and string theory becomes unfashionable. Then it could happen that nine thousand string theorists lose their jobs. They have been trained in a narrow specialty, and they may be unemployable in other fields of science.

Dyson - Birds and Frogs