The Making of a Market Guru: Forbes Presents 25 Years of Ken Fisher

Chapter 16. 1999: IPOs, Y2K, Nasdaq, Oh My!

"The Great Humiliator has only one goal: to humiliate as many people as possible for as many dollars as possible over as long a time as possible. En route its favorite victims are professionals. As a group they can't be right."

—"Bet Against the Experts," April 19, 1999

"Y2K is the most widely hyped 'disaster' in modern history. It is well documented: The only folks who aren't familiar with it are in the upper Amazon basin, rapidly fleeing the rest of humanity. I need not even define Y2K for you to know exactly what I'm referencing."

—"Greater Fools," October 18, 1999

Many folks remember 1999 as a banner year for stocks. However, big stock returns did not necessarily translate into a fantastic year broadly for individual investors. How so? Nineteen-ninety-nine's big returns were concentrated in just a few categories: technology stocks, telecommunications stocks, anything Internet related, and just about any initial public offering (IPO). And IPOs aside, the bigger the stock, the better the return. The heavily technology-weighted Nasdaq Composite Index, which mostly kept pace with the S&P 500 during the earlier years of the bull market, skyrocketed an astounding 85.6 percent in 1999. As an extreme example of the 1999 fervor, telecommunications firm Qualcomm gained over 2,000 percent that year. The hottest IPO of the year was VA Linux — a firm selling computer systems that ran the Linux open-source operating system. The firm's IPO was priced ...