[pdog]

Public investors lost much more than $27B. (Private investors made money.)

There were thousands of IPOs during the 1996-1999 period. Hundreds of billion of dollars were raised.

The impact of the dot-com bubble in terms of actual losses was hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars.

[Retric]

Net losses are different from nominal losses. If someone buys at 10, the stock hits 15$ then drops to 5$, they lost 5$ a share not 10$ a share. We are easily talking about 100's of billions in losses, but 1.7 trillion is an over estimate.