
What did 1999 feel like and how did it feel different than today? - justinzollars
I feel like we are in boom times but the fundamentals are bad. I see a lot of Greed and some bad things as a result: fake news, click-bait etc. How did 1999 feel? Did it feel different than now?
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PaulHoule
The boom was more broad based, I identified it when I looked at the Delia's
catalog circa 1996 and noticed Cornell students were dressing better, skirts
were getting shorter, competition for mates was intensifying. Money was in the
air.

The NASDAQ 100 was crazy high, P/E ratios were about 2x what they are now (now
we are at the high end of normal and the low end of bubble). Public
participation in the stock market was high, I called the top and pulled 50% of
my money out of the market in December 1999 because I watched a football game
and saw all the ads were for stocks and bonds, not beer. I took the rest out
in April 2000.

Today CNBC ratings set a new low almost every month. In March 2000 my broker
got me stock in PALM at the IPO and it popped 4 times. Now tech IPOs like FB
and SNAP typically drop on the first day.

Nobody cares about the public markets, but Theranos was a canary in the coal
mine, other private companies like magic leap and Uber may be the next
dominoes to fall. Back in the day it was Enron, lucent, WorldCom, all public
companies.

My hope is that when the Bay area bubble pops it won't hurt the rest of the
country much because it doesn't spread the wealth around.

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nostrademons
No way. 1999 was full of optimism; you'd go see (non-technical) friends over
dinner and they'd talk about how they were suddenly rich because they'd
invested in dot-coms. Even if you were more prudent and hadn't put your net
worth into tech stocks, you still enjoyed the benefits of delivery startups
offering below-market prices because of VC subsidies, advertising startups
that paid you to browse the web, and this huge wealth of information that was
just beginning to be explored. Broadband and streaming video had just been
introduced, and available bandwidth was increasing by an order of magnitude
roughly every 2 years, with prices remaining about the same. Computers were
also still doubling in speed & hard disk capacity every 2 years. Oh, and
everybody had jobs: the dot-com boom startups tended to hire rabidly (across
the country, too, not just in Silicon Valley), which created a labor shortage
and pushed up wages. If I had to equate it to a recent year, I'd say early
2014.

I'd say that today feels much more like 2002 or early 2010. In other words,
we're in a bust, at least in the tech industry. You _see_ a lot of greed
because we're in the hangover from a boom, where all the malfeasance that was
papered over when stock prices were going up comes to light - in boom times,
everybody just assumes that it's the natural order of things for everything to
go up. The technology world also fixates on many of the same things that were
common in 2002-2003. There's the same concern about computer security - in
2003 the web just basically _broke_ , Microsoft had a complete monopoly on
both browser and OS and every month there was a new worm that spread across
the Internet. There's the same interest in P2P and decentralized alternatives
which comes from people not trusting centralized institutions or corporations.
There's also a resurgence in interest in programming languages and system
software, which comes because when people aren't getting rich off software,
the MBAs all go away and you're left with the hardcore techies.

Big differences from the 99-03 cycle: there's an oligopoly (ApAmaGooBook) of
major tech companies rather than a monopoly (Microsoft). Markets are bigger:
Paul Graham is a celebrity for selling his company for $40M, but that wouldn't
even register today, a hot startup isn't hot unless it's worth at least $1B.
Most of the wealth is private; SOX killed the IPO market, so ordinary people
can't get rich off startups but aren't wiped out either. It's also more
geographically concentrated in the Bay Area: the first dot-com boom actually
created a lot of companies _throughout_ the country, but the privatization of
growth capital means that growth industries now only happen in major cities.
The barriers to entry to getting into the industry are higher: I started
writing websites as a high-school student, but now you need to know
Babel/ES6/React/Webpack/Node/etc. just to get started as a frontend developer.

