I believe it was ~13 years before the nasdaq reached the same level as the peak of the dot com bubble. I also find it odd to use the peak as the primary reference point. It was a brief moment in time. For example, if you had invested in the nasdaq in Feb 99 or Nov 2001, instead of Nov 99, it recovered in 7 years. If you started in Aug 98 it recovered in ~5 years. There was rough a window of a year where it would have been really bad to invest, but that is why everyone recommends dollar-cost-averaging (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dollarcostaveraging.asp) instead of investing a ton all at once.
Ya'll are talking past each other. Since I made the comment, I will define my terms more precisely. In 2-3 years someone who consistently invests a fixed portion of their earnings/assets into a weighted vehicle/basket will be enjoying an appreciating net worth. I'm not claiming to be able to call the bottom, but I'm also not measuring "recovering" as peak-to-peak. Peak to peak would be past-tense "recovered".
Has the “pace of technology” really picked up in the last 10 years though?
In 2012:
- Apple and Google were the dominant mobile platforms
- Microsoft was dominant on the desktop
- Amazon was the dominant retailer and the dominant (but nascent cloud provider)
- Google was the dominant search engine and YouTube was dominant
- Facebook was the dominant social network
-Microsoft has been one of the top five companies by market cap since 2000 and Apple has been in the top 5 since 2011.
- Intel is still the top PC processor manufacturer.
If you saw a modern smart phone in 2022, would you really be impressed with the iPhone 12 ProMax compared to the iPhone 5s?
I was using a 2 year old Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell with 8GB RAM, gigabit Ethernet and a 1920x1200 (not a typo) screen. That computer can still run the latest version of Office and Chrome today.
In other words, the landscape hasn’t changed that much.
Now compare 2012-2002.
Have there been any new widely successful tech companies emerging since Facebook in 2009?
Amazon. AWS was just a small cloud on the horizon in 2012. They are the dominant platform to run applications and (more surprisingly) now the #2 DBMS vendor according to recent Gartner numbers. That's a major change. [0]