By Maxine Shapiro, KERA 90.1 business commentator
Dallas, TX – March 10, 2000: the NASDAQ - 5,048. March 10, 2003: NASDAQ under 1300. I'm Maxine Shapiro with KERA Marketplace Midday.
Maybe you were like me, envious of all those technology investors in the late 90's who were making money on a minute-to-minute basis. It was like kernels of hot popcorn overflowing, fresh and abundant. And eventually like me, you turned grateful. You never wanted to handle the risk, and therefore you were left unscathed by the downturn. Or perhaps you were one of the many that did get hurt, and you relive the damage every month when you open your statements. Either way, it was history.
The NASDAQ doubled from the previous summer by the time it reached its peak on March 10, 2000. The month that followed was one of the fastest freefalls the market had seen. By the middle of that April, it was down one-third. Since then, the NASDAQ has declined 74%.
Back in the 90's, some clever investors began calling Microsoft, Cisco, Dell and Intel, "The Four Horsemen." No company could come close to their dominance in the market. Three years later, Dell is down 49%; Microsoft, 54%; Intel, down 72%, and Cisco a whopping 80%. Down, yes - but dead, no; not by any means.
But it was the many dot.com's that became dot.gone in that first year even before the recession began in March 2001. In November of 2000, the internet monitoring company, Webmergers.com - who is still around, by the way - reported more than a dot.com a day was closing their sites. By then 8,000 jobs were lost, and today - about one in three of the 1.8 million unemployed come from technology.
There were survivors, though, and Dallas has one of them. Hotel Reservation Network - now Hotels.com - rose 62% on its first day of trading, a few weeks before the peak. Today, it has more than doubled. For KERA Marketplace Midday, I'm Maxine Shapiro.
Marketplace Midday Reports air on KERA 90.1 Monday - Friday at 1:04 p.m. To contact Maxine Shapiro, please send emails to mshapiro@kera.org.