Tech Stocks Roar Again in Faint Echo of 2000
I roll my eyes as these tortured attempts to draw parallels that aren&#x27;t even superficially similar.<p>2000 was an IPO bubble of companies that had no revenue, no prospect of revenue and no business plan. Analysts went out of their way to justify valuations by inventing new metrics like revenue-to-price multipliers.<p>What&#x27;s different today is that the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon are money-making machines on a scale probably not matched since at least the era of Standard Oil, the 19th century railroad tycoons and other industrialists like Carnegie.<p>I mean, Apple is trading at a P&#x2F;E of less than 19 and it has a market cap of $842B. That is mind-boggling but not at all outrageous.<p>In 2000 the tech IPO bubble burst. In 2007 the subprime disaster came crashing down. It is absolutely certain there will be another downturn in the future but at this point I have no idea what the next trigger will be.<p>My best guess is something to do with China. This could take many forms. Some think that the Chinese economy is a house of cards. There has clearly been a flight of capital from China. Who knows where this ends? Also, Chinese money in particular has been flooding into Western real estate markets. This too may come to a head.<p>Or it could be something to do with North Korea or even Iran.<p>Or populists movements may drive Western governments to crack down on what they see as excessive power by the large tech companies, particularly in the EU.<p>Or a constitutional crisis instigated by our current lunatic-in-chief.<p>Whatever the case I really don&#x27;t see any significant parallels to 2000.