From Agence France-Presse
Mark April 23, 2015 as the day the Nasdaq market finally left the dot-com crash, and billions of dollars lost to the first technology bubble, behind.
REUTERS
It’s been a long time — 15 years, one month and 13 days to be exact. On Thursday, the Nasdaq Composite Index finished at a new closing high, 5,056.06, topping the previous mark set on March 10, 2000 of 5,048.62.
The upstart market that symbolized the new era of the Internet economy and digital life — as opposed to the old heavy-industry stalwarts of the Dow Jones Industrial Average — climbed spectacularly from 1996 to early 2000.
Over that time the index quintupled to mint thousands of new multi-millionaires and fund sharp and quirky new companies rooted in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The Dow barely doubled in the same period.
But the Nasdaq, trading many companies that proved to be more dreams on paper and in garages than sources of tangible profits, then crashed as spectacularly, losing nearly all of the late 1990s gains in 30 months, and stunning hundreds of thousands of investors who ventured into the markets for the first time drawn by dot-com dreams.
The market bottomed at 1,114.11 in October 2002.
In 2000, the index was led by software companies and chipmakers: Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Oracle, and Sun. Yahoo was the seventh largest company on the exchange, Amazon ranked 41st and Apple 45th. Google was just emerging in the industry, and only joined the exchange in 2004.
Today it’s Apple at the top, now the largest company in the world, worth $755 billion by market capitalization.
Google is the Nasdaq’s second largest company at $372 billion, and Microsoft is only third, worth $356 billion, its share price still one-third lower than the peak 15 years ago.
Amazon, the online retailing king, is fourth and a company no one had dreamed of at the time, Facebook, fifth.
The price/earnings ratio for the market Thursday stood at about 25 times, compared to about 190 when the market peaked in March 2000.
© 1994-2015 Agence France-Presse
