The bubble burst

01/01/2000

The year when the dot-com collapsed, resulting in huge losses for legions of investors.

The dot-com bubble was a historic speculative bubble covering roughly 1997 – 2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the internet sector and related fields.

The period was marked by the founding (and, in many cases, spectacular failure) of a group of new internet-based companies commonly referred to as dot-coms. Companies were seeing their stock prices shoot up if they simply added an "e-" prefix to their name and/or a ".com" to the end, which one author called "prefix investing".

The collapse of the bubble took place during 2000-2001. Some companies failed completely. Others lost a large portion of their market capitalization but remained stable and profitable. Some later recovered and surpassed their dot-com-bubble peaks, e.g., Amazon.com, whose stock went from 107 to 7 dollars per share, but a decade later exceeded 200.

The NASDAQ, which listed a large number of tech companies affected by the bubble, peaked at over 5,000, then lost 10 percent of its value in a single day, and finally hit bottom in October of 2002. On March 10, 2000, NASDAQ composite index peaked at 5,048.62.