[ArtTimeInvestor]

The all time high of the Shiller PE was in December 1999.

If your hypothesis at that time was that the internet would benefit tech companies, it was not a bad time to invest:

Microsoft shares were $58. Now they are $510.

=> 9% annualized ROI.

Amazon was at $4. Now it is at $220.

=> 17% annualized ROI.

QQQ was at $89 and is now at $592

=> 8% annualized ROI.

[panphora]

You're cherry picking the tech titans that made it out of the Dot Com boom alive. The NASDAQ-100 had to replace 36 of its components between 2000-2002 due to bankruptcies and delistings - nobody knew in 1999 which companies would be the survivors.

The NASDAQ topped at 5,048.62 on March 10, 2000. It took 15 years for the NASDAQ to recover to its dot-com peak level. In those 15 years, you got an inflation-adjusted negative annualized ROI.

Annualized return of the NASDAQ from the 2000 peak to today is an inflation-adjusted 3.4%. Even "sure thing" blue chips like Cisco and Intel still haven't recovered their 2000 peaks in real terms, 25 years later.

[ArtTimeInvestor]

    You're cherry picking

Microsoft was the largest public tech company by far in 1999. So I wouldn't call that choice cherry picking. And wasn't Amazon with about $30B market cap the largest internet pureplay at that time?

    nobody knew in 1999 which companies would be the survivors

How do you know that?

[btilly]

This is selection bias. You are picking companies that, in retrospect, we all know because they did well.

But most of the companies that people were "investing" in at the time, the ones that drove that PE, were dot coms that went out of business. Like pets.com.

As Warren Buffett warned at the time, every new technology wave results in a similar bubble. People invest because we know that the technology will reshape the future. And we reward the first to the market because we can't imagine that they won't be long-term winners.

But the companies that arise early in a technology bubble, are seldom the ones that survive long-term.

We are witnessing the same today. Most of the current AI leaders, won't be AI leaders in 20 years. So which one will you invest in?

[turnsout]

I agree 100%. If your investing horizon is at least 10 years, there's literally never a bad time to buy technology equities (ideally as an index). What's the counterargument? That technology will be less important in the future? That sounds apocalyptic.

[nradov]

The counterargument is that most developed countries are facing a slow demographic collapse, so those tech companies will eventually run out of new customers and revenue growth opportunities. Not exactly apocalyptic but more like stagnation and malaise. I'm not claiming that will inevitably occur but it's reasonably likely.

[karmakurtisaani]

Also, these companies are valued like growth stocks. Even without the demographic collapse it will be difficult to find massive growth at their scale. Some might do that, but which ones?

[infecto]

Is this not cherry picking based on survivor bias? I don’t know the results but you should run it against a basket. If you invested in the sp500 march of 99 to now your annualized return is 6%.

[josefritzishere]

I think all of us who were there remember the layoffs that followed this moment.

[boyka]

These are just 2, what happened to all the other 1999 tech companies?