[smanek]

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/...

She's often considered the face of the irrational exuberance behind the first dot com boom/bubble.

Rating many companies that subsequently lose 90-100% of their market cap as 'strong buys' is a pretty scary track record. IIRC, her portfolio of 'outperforms-or-better' lost ~80% of their value in one year.

Granted that the 'market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent', etc so she may not deserve all the scorn heaped on her (I haven't done the research to know ...)

[jpdoctor]

To add to smanek's reply: Meeker was part of Morgan Stanley during a period of heavy conflict of interest. MS did not separate the function of investment banking from research, so you can imagine why her investment ratings on no-profit internet stocks were quite high. (Henry Blodget got caught (the infamous "POS memo"), it is unclear how much farther Eliot Spitzer would have gotten if he hadn't been caught with his pants down.) She eventually admitted that she did not author investment reports with her name on it, so who knows if the article above is actually based on her words or not.

Whether it's true or not about people "giving up possessions for the internet" is immaterial. The takeaway with Mary should be: A shyster of a saleswoman is trying to sell you something.