hahha,, good post, But with names like jnpr, cmgi, arba, jdsu, pdli, BBH, sdli.. sdli was a damn beast,,,, hell qqq was there but it only moved 3-4 points per day, compared to a .55cent range today. The less you knew the more you made. until spring 2001, then the game was over for most. EF
I had a friend who was going to retire on JNPR...until he rode it all the way down. I know of another who had 900,000 of level 3 LVLT at 18 and rode it up to 135 and then rode it back down ...yes, $130 mill at its peak...its at .95 now...he margined it to buy all kinds of toys and went upside down in his account...cant divuldge the kids name though...he owned 5 clubs at one point in south beach...google it
JNPR was a great one. I recall the day its IPO hit the secondary market. Traded in the $90's. From there went on a rampage. In Jan 2000 split 3:1 and then in June 2000 split yet again 2:1 Even if you were not a trader, this is the essence of what made the 90's such a once in a lifetime chance for the average investor. The dramatic compounding effect of your gains is ridiculous when a company splits its stock like this, so many times in such a short period of time. Who could ever forget the run RMBS made. I recall waking up and seeing pre-market tickers scrolling through the screen. Someone mentioned SDLI. OCLI was another one. JDSU made an astounding FIVE 2:1 stock splits in less than 4 years between June 1996 - March 2000. Say you had just 1000 shares of JDSU in early 1996. At the end of those splits; you would now have 32000 shares. ICGE was another one. I think at one point, it split from $150 range 2:1 and literally in two days, was back trading close to $150. B2B was another space. CMRC and ARBA were monsters. CMRC I think was the first stock to break $500+; before QCOM broke $600 Decemberish 1999.
And in a way, I was. :eek: Hey, we all know there are more stars on the flag than years in my total life-expectancy... but still, it's always best to avoid jumping to conclusions before acquiring sufficient evidence to confirm whatever you're thinking.
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.
Some things I remember from that era: -EMLX plunging from 113 to 43 after a fake news announcement. I remember someone telling on irc #daytraders chat that there was bad news and I grabbed some puts. A bit later the stock went into a deathspiral and I was just offering the puts at ridiculous prices and they got sold. Just before the stock halted. -April 2000. Was looking at the market, but flat, when all of sudden there where no bids. Like looking into the abyss that was. Eerie market. Bounced back later that day. -Staying over at a friend who was a trader and broker and just going out to dinner every night, we, these two twenty year olds in the best restaurants drinking $200 Napa valley bottle like it was bud light. He ran his account from 30k to 1.1mio in 3 months and even got offered a book deal. Good times.
EMLX I still remember. AMD and INTC were battling it out. YHOO was one to remember. Ebay another. The .com IPOs were just insane. TLCM semi was my favorite but had tanked on a prudential downgrade after I had made 100 pct on it. Sold 2 weeks before the got bought by MCHP. Sat and cried at the dinner table. I was 14 or 15. It was nuts. I was through a custodial accts that my parents set up. I remember having each fraction for the ticks memorized to the 16th. Lol. Ahhh those were the days. Fuck decimals . I thought it was dumb when they made the switch. I'm trying to remember some other big names.
Cutten, I don't understand. We all know there are like fifteen total hot chicks in all of England, and it wasn't any better back in the 90's. So, what's up with that? Did you live somewhere else back then?