Harmon (internet footnote) now adds insult to injury with a post mortem "Nasdaq fall no surprise after meteoric rise" column.
siliconinvestor.com
Bravo Steve, at least that bit of prolific hindsight advice didn't cost $100 and the total destruction of one's financial livelihood.
Subject 36159
Steve, do everyone a favor and disappear like the equity in your picks, similar to how the original Harmon tout board "mysteriously" vanished after your $100 victims started raising their pitchforks.
Adios Zero Gravity.
Monday, October 16, 2000
Nasdaq fall no surprise after meteoric rise
If you take about three clicks back from the hype and noise surrounding the stock market, the Nasdaq's rise the past 10 years shows that today's love-me, love-me-not Nasdaq was bound for a fall. There's just too much momentum pushing it and not enough shoulder behind it.
It's easy to forget that the Nasdaq, a key bellwether for many money managers and investors, has soared from 500 in March 1991 to more than 5,000 earlier this year.
In October of 1990, the Nasdaq sat at 330, which seems comical at today's levels, even with the volatile hiccups up and down. On an absolute basis, that's a 906 percent rise through Oct. 13th's close. So stop the violins playing every time the Nasdaq has the jitters.
The numbers don't drive themselves, however. Let's consider the technology landscape to see what caused the rocket ship to roar.
Go back to the future.
1990-1993: Technology-wise Apple's Mac was the hottest PC going. A lot of hype surrounded personal digital assistants with the Newton and pen computing raging on headlines. IBM and its clones ran on DOS, the equivalent then of leaded gasoline. DOS wasn't pretty and spewed a lot of smoke, but those were the days of clunker computers thundering away on word processing, a spreadsheet and little else. On the other side of tech, there were some stirrings in biotech and talk of DNA decoding.
Commodore pushed the Amiga, one of the first PCs to allow everyday people to create audio and video on the desktop (some TV stations still use the Amiga for editing, in fact). IBM, Apple, DELL, Zenith Data Systems and many more flavors still didn't trigger a huge adoption rate among consumers. You'd be lucky to see one in 50 homes with a PC. It was a geek gadget, not a device most people felt they needed.
In other words, PCs crawled out of the primordial stew of Silicon Valley but still hadn't caught the imagination of Wall Street. Investors waited for results of PC build-out. It was a slow road.
The Nasdaq kept its slow, steady climb, yet remained well below 1,000 for the years 1990-1993. Evolution of a species.
Let's fast forward a little.
In 1994, the talk was of interactive TV ruling the world. Companies including Time Warner, Silicon Graphics, Microsoft, TCI and U.S. West lined up to push video on demand. At least in the eyes of the white-gloved who envisioned it, it was the killer application of interactivity.
The Nasdaq didn't stir but continued a slow climb. Evolution of a species.
This intersection was where Moore's Law, named after Intel's Gordon Moore, appeared as a signpost for investors. Moore said that processor speeds could double every year, although later this was revised to the current time frame of 18 months. This was one catalyst for investors to map technology growth, a benchmark. In 1994, CD-ROM, Multimedia and enhanced CDs popped out. CDs were perceived as kings of multimedia, cutting edge. The big item was a CD-ROM drive on your PC. A 90 MHz Pentium was bleeding edge.
It wasn't until 1995 that Wall Street took notice of technology in a different way, not as evolutionary growth but revolutionary change. How? Revolution of a species.
Technology was flopping along spineless and suddenly up jumps a backbone: the browser Mosaic, a graphical user interface for a researcher's world called the "World Wide Web." The browser was a few thousand lines of code written by a motley crew of programmers at the University of Champaign-Illinois, combining the hyperworld of Tim Berners-Lee with the user-friendliness graphics not unlike an Apple Mac. Marc Andreessen led the browser invention while a student at Illinois, before going on to co-found Netscape.
The browser became another catalyst for Wall Street, amplifying the PC era, a benchmark for technology growth in a whole new way. The browser became the platform for visual communicating. We went from fewer than 10 million people using the Internet in 1993 to more than 200 million today.
From 1995 to 2000, the Nasdaq jumped from 700 to the 5,000 mark. The Nasdaq was noticed.<i/> |
