Right, people often look to companies like Intel, AMD, Nvidia and think 'If only I held!'

They don't look at 3DFX, Transmeta, Centillium, Virata, or the numerous other companies because they are dead in the graveyard of failed companies that have lost full valuation.

Depending on how much you invest in each, if you panic-buy/sell, etc changes all that. You're also ultimately betting on whether or not there will ever be another bubble/hype in the industry, and that you are betting wide enough into fully speculative companies like Nvidia instead of just aiming for power players. People forget that the market for luxury PC hardware barely existed at the time and was populated by a very small group of wealthy consumers. Expecting that to take off against the cheap prices of console offerings and against the technical know-how of assembling/disassembling PCs is closer to faith than any rationale.

Just by law of probability and total number of actual bagholders, the vast majority of people didn't bet that way. But I guess if you think you're special or have some lucrative insight into the industry, you might think you're an exception to that rule.

To spell out my thinking more completely: Yes, I did not mean AskJeeves specifically, I meant broad investment. And likewise nobody should go all in on just SpaceXSI or whatever.

And in any case no, you should not pour your money into tech stocks if you need that money to eat, that was true then as it is today.

> This is the definition of survivorship bias. There are a ton of tech stocks that you would have lost your shirt on had you invested in them just prior to the crash.

Which is why you buy an index, rather than try pick individual stocks.

Peak to peak, inflation adjusted, can be 10 to 15 years for the really big busts though. It's not entirely irrational if you moved in at the peak.

If you were in on the upside then you've got much less ground to retrace.

And it's painful to watch your holdings drop like you said if you're planning on retiring in the next 1, 2, 5 years.

So I get it.

If you're 25 you've got tons of room to maneuver. If you're 60 things are a lot less rosy (even if by now you should theoretically be cycling into less volatile assets. But bonds didn't do that great either over that period) .

In most western countries, pets are on #2 after spendings for children in households, so your bet made sense. Though, as a lot of companies, tractions wasnt big enough back then.

Today, e.g. ZooPlus is one of the biggest pet-stuff-retailers (2023 revenue 2.5billion)

I'd start from a slightly more-charitable assumption which ends up in a slightly different "Hold up that's a little optimistic" territory.

1. Yes, if someone generally invested in "dot-com stocks" before that crash--covering both winners and losers--they might today have a surprising amount of (potential) dollars.

2. However much of that impressive-looking sum would be just because of 25-30 years in the market.

3. So we need to scale that "very rich" against someone putting the same money into an total-stock market index fund back then, which may not make it look nearly as impressive.

This is pretty much why the best financial advice for 99.99% of people is "stick with index funds".

Yeah you won't get extremely lucky and 200x your money because you bought NVidia a decade ago, but you also won't lose all your money because you bought Enron.

what? you mean that all my beenz.com stock is worth nil?? but it's an online currency! it's the future!

Inflation calculator puts that 1k at a value of 1.95k today. Seems like a lousy 26 year investment. I guess it's better than putting it under your matress.

I think it's more if you had invested in an index fund you'd be in a pretty good place. Individual companies would have a much larger range of outcomes (as ever).

Maybe, but 50% growth in a stock over 25 years is fairly bad.

That's pretty good.

I know people who bought Ask Jeeves at the height of the bubble.