Quote from Debaser82:
Any traders or investors here who played the market back then? Care to share some of your experience....
The tech bubble was 8-9 YEARS of rising prices, after a prior great decade too. Slight difference to 21 months after the worst crash since 1929-32. The nasdaq went from 500 to 5000. From 2000 to 2010 the nasdaq has gone from 5000 to 2000.
The worst market environments from 1982 to 2000 were 1987, a 3 month crash, 1990, a moderate bear market, and 1998, a 3 month correction. 2008 saw a 60% killer bear market. Slight difference.
The eras are not even remotely comparable. Remember, the S&P is just back to where it was when Lehman went down in late 2008. The S&P at the end of 2010 is DOWN 20% since 2007 - down over a 3 year period. It is down 20% since 2000, a whole decade underwater. People who bought in 2005 are only just back to breakeven, and massively behind people who just kept cash in the bank or T-bonds.
1995-2000 saw the S&P making 20%, 30% year after year after year with only one 3-month dip in 1998. You can't even begin to compare that to 2000 - the bubble era was up 10-fold over the previous 18 years and everyone was coining money.
As for experiences, there is another thread about this, that Rearden has already pointed out. Lots of good stories there. Imagine the housing bubble, but even more insane by far, and applying to stocks.
Imagine a pool contractor turning $18k into $40 million in less than 2 years by leveraging dot.com gogo stocks on full margin (Dan Zanger). Imagine a worthless POS pink sheet stock going from $2 to $50 in 48 hours, then going back to <$5 a couple of days later, after bankrupting dozens of short-sellers in a pure pump & dump. Imagine IPOs that anyone can get in on, opening up 400 or 500% on the first print, giving you free money. Imagine stocks like Yahoo IPOing at a market cap of $1 billion despite having almost no sales, let alone profits, having everyone and every financial paper and magazine laugh and say to short the crap out of it, and then seeing it go up 100 fold in 4 years. Or even crazier stocks from abroad like Softbank (Japan) or Durlacher (UK) going from 10p to 5000p then all the way back down in a few years.
Imagine a message board company like Elitetrader (but with worse format and content), instead of being worth a few million, actually turning down $500 million bids from venture capital because they thought they could IPO at $1 billion+ valuation. Imagine internet 'incubator' funds, raising $100 million in cash, then floating on the market, and immediately being given market caps of 500m to 1 billion, because people just *assumed* that they could make 5-10 times their money on their cash by investing in dot.coms. Imagine blue chip stocks with internet subsidiaries, where they spun them off, and the blue chip company's holding of the dot.com became worth more than the entire market cap of the blue chip.
Imagine a market environment where Jim Cramer's calls actually made money -
lots of money. Imagine a bar calling itself The Wall Street Pub that had a ticker tape above the counter, and terminals where you could check your quotes and place your daytrades as you drank.
Imagine 19 year olds coming out of school with $5k on a credit card, and becoming millionaires from trading simple moving average or stochastic patterns in 1-2 years. Imagine people going "wow really, that's so cool, how do I get into that?" when you tell them you are a daytrader, and hot slutty chicks then wanting to snort coke off your cock because of it, even if you looked like a skinny pasty 4-eyed geek. That's what it was like.
. I thought it was dumb when they made the switch. I'm trying to remember some other big names.