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According to AJO, institutional money manager in Philadelphia, the average return since March 10, 2000, for the S&P 500 is about 5%, and the NASDAQ Composite less than 1% annually, including dividends. Zweig cites this to show that investors not make the mistake of overpaying for tech stocks or startup stocks, or buy into the hype for a second time since 2000. The NASDAQ Composite hit 5048 in April 2015. The last time it was at this level was on March 10, 2000. Cisco traded at 167 times earnings at the time. For the average long term S&P 500 index shows it traded at an average of 16 times earnings. This is a sober reminder for the average investor that gains depend on on what you pay for a stock.

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The old NASDAQ in 2000 cannot be compared to the new NASDAQ in 2015 because the companies in the index have changed, and the proportion of tech and health care companies has also changed. Healthcare and consumer companies are now 37% on the index compared to 18% in the NASDAQ index in 2000. Tech is a much smaller component of the NASDAQ, declining from 64% to 43%. And three companies Apple, Google and Microsoft, makeup 20% of the index, with Amazon, Facebook and Intel added making that 30% of the entire 2015 NASDAQ index. Only 3 of the top ten companies in the 2000 NASDAQ are around in 2015 NASDAQ index- Intel Corp., Microsoft, and Cisco Systems. Yahoo, Oracle, Dell, Sun, JDS, WorldCom are no longer the top 10 companies in the index as they were in 2015. The speculative momentum stocks such as Netflix and Tesla make up 0.38% and 0.33% of the NASDAQ in 2015. In healthcare part of NASDAQ 2015 companies such as Gilead Sciences and Amgen are in the top ten.

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Stocks that did better than Google in the tech field are Apple, Sales Force, Western Digital, Priceline, Netflix. Keurig and Monster Beverage followed by Priceline are the all time leading stocks for returns. Google made about 1294% return since the IPO, taking $10,000 inital investment to $139,000.

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Personal and institutional investing expert Jeremy Grantham has followed the market for several decades. Here he warns of an epic bubble particularly in technology related companies similar to 2000. The two stock market disasters in 2000 and 2009 hurt small investors. With the interest rates pushed down to near zero by central bankers, investors in the U.S. were faced with difficult choices of seeing no return on savings for a decade or investing more in the stock market. Collapsing stock markets lead to a loss of upward mobility in society as many families lose a portion of their savings. The significance of Mr. Grantham's call for caution is based on simple common sense when he says that electric car maker Tesla's stock price would mean over 1 million dollars for each car sold by Tesla, compared to $9000 for each car sold by General Motors. Traditional car makers and other manufacturers are being deliberately under priced on markets with the reverse for some tech companies. Major investment firms such as Morgan Stanley, large investment banks,  Grantham says are part of this system of overpricing, and are not going to say proceed with caution. ...

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WSJ's Jakab looks at free cash flow yield in value investing in 2025 using data from 1991 to 2024. With the rage over tech stocks Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and the like and intangible value of these companies, can value investing with free cash flow work as an alternative in 2025.

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The S&P is up 1.3% for the 1st quarter of 2014. The Dow Jones Industrial Average declined by 0.7% in the 1st quarter. Tech IPO's, biotechnology stocks, solar energy stocks and junk bonds pulled back in March 2014 after what were seen as excessive gains in trading. In the bond market the Barclays U.S. Aggregate bond index was up by 1.8% in the 1st quarter, as investors responded to dampening economic news and the emerging markets crisis. Analysts point to the 10.6% rise in S&P 500 earnings in the 4th quarter of 2013 over the prior year quarter, as giving earnings a chance to catch up to the higher P/E's and boosting prospects of stocks in the latter part of 2014. S&P 500 stocks trade at 15.2 times the next 12 months expected earnings figures, according to FactSet, compared to 13.2 and13.8 average for the last 5 and 10 years.

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The behavior of the US stock market is examined in this analysis in the WSJ. It shows that tech stocks that comprise a major part of the S&P 500 made a big surge in 2020 and 2021, dropping by 30% in 2022. Consumer discretionary stocks which also experienced an upsurge in 2020 and 2021 are facing headwinds from higher inflation and decline in demand. Retailers such as Target and Walmart are reducing inventories as demand shifts. 

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Former QWest CEO was convicted of insider trading for selling $52 million in stock in Qwest when he knew the company's finances were failing. He was sentenced to 6 years in prison. Some of the people involved in the previous tech bubble are being sent to prison years later.

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From north east Indiana and Indiana University SVB CEO Becker works his way up to a bank in Detroit with offices in California, and joins SVB in his twenties. He opened SVB's office in Boulder in 1996 and became president in 2008. Two things made SVB different. It seemed like the 2008 crisis had never happened. The management at the company Becker, Beck, and another executive Descheneaux hired from Bancwest, acted more like tech entrepreneurs and much less like bankers. They seemed to have mastered the way of optimistic talk to tech entrepreneurs, the language the culture, and did not share the same grasp of the economic environment of others who had weathered the 2008 crisis. For most of 2021 the company did not have a risk officer, according to the WSJ. And did not see the aspects of duration risk in having assets invested in long term Treasury's when interest rates were increased by the Fed rapidly to fight inflation decreasing the value of bonds. Startups and SVB management in their optimism both ignored the risk of not having the backing of FDIC insurance as insurance is limited to $250,000 in deposits, and most of the SVB's deposits were much larger. The US government wary of criticism of a bailout insists the FDIC backing provided to prevent systemic risk will not cost the taxpayers as it will come from a special assessment on banks. Nothing better explains the collapse than a look at the graphs of SVB's deposits in this WSJ report, in 2019 deposits and financial assets increase at about 50%, at about 100% doubling in 2020. Stock performance mirrored this.  By 2020 the supply chain disruptions were real and inflation was taking off, the Fed under Jay Powell was taking up the fight against inflation with sharp rise in interest rates. SVB did not grasp the seriousness of the situation. Venture capital gleaned the risks as they mounted and a bank run with withdrawals of as much of $42 billion led to the collapse.   ...

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With a new corporate board in place the government is planning to sell a 51% stake in Satyam to a private bidder. Satyam's capitalization on the New York Stock Exchange is now $600 million down from $7 billion in May 2008. Spice, a tech firm, Larsen and Toubro, Mahindra and others have expressed interest. One estimate of cost to settle lawsuits is $440 to $840 million.

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The Dow Jones Average is outdated says the WSJ, and belongs to the age of slide rule, human stock selection, and does not belong in an age of automated index tracking.The 7 large Tech stocks make up 13.9% of the Dow Jones Average and 33% of the S&P 500. And Alphabet, Meta and Tesla are not part of the Dow Jones Average. As a result Dow Jones was outperformed by S&P 500 by 10 percentage points in 2023 and 2024.

Just 5 stocks United Health, Goldman Sachs, Home Depot, Caterpillar and Sherwin Williams make up 32% of the Dow Jones Average.

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U.S. stock prices went up in the first quarter 2012 even with a decline in the growth of the earnings rate.

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A detailed discussion of P/E ratios and opinion of different experts on why the U.S. stock market may be overpriced in 2012. The divergence between P/E ratios in Europe and the U.S. is of special concern. P/E ratios for 10 years in Germany and France are at 12, compared to 22 for the U.S. The gap between U.S. and German and French valuations is about 10%, compared to a 120 year average of 1.7 percentage points, says the chief investment officer of Citi Private Bank in London. Safety is one factor, but the divergence is too wide to be accounted for by safety alone.

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The U.S. market has better prospects than emerging markets according to some analysts. This is because a large number of U.S. tech and blue chip companies have good earnings and cash positions, and lower valuations. Commodities prices are volatile because China is raising interest rates to control inflation, slowing growth. Many emerging markets like Russia and Brazil are dependent on commodities exports making them riskier as China's growth slows.

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The resilience of U.S. large cap value stocks was shown in 2000-2002 and 2008-2009, and offered investors greater protection, according to research by Mark Hulbert of Hulbert Financial Digest.

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U.S. investor preference for value stocks over fast growing companies with high valuations and P/E ratios in April 2014.

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The U.S. Dow Jones Industrial Average passes 15,000 in May 2013. The DJIA average has increased by 130% after reaching a low in March 2009. The DJIA peaked at 14000 in July 2007 before falling 54% and recovering to the 14000 level in Feb 2013.

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Priceline surged in a tech boom of two decades ago before coming down. It has regenerated itself through its 2005 acquisition of Amsterdam based portal Booking.com, followed by acquiring booking site Agoda and travel search engine Kayak. This has helped the stock rise in the last decade. Over 90% of its revenue comes from outside the U.S., even though its original model of naming a price for a booking is gone.  Booking.com is making an attempt to penetrate the Chinese travel market with a series of acquisitions starting with online travel agency Ctrip.com. Ctrip.com is established but recent acquisitions are burning cash. There is skepticism about these acquisitions as Chinese company share prices are seen as inflated similar to the stock booms that went bust in the U.S. Booking.com invested heavily in online advertising primarily through Google. Yet though western customers use search engines to find and book travel, in China customers go directly to Ctrip or apps like Meituan to book trips. To get people to book Chinese travel companies offer large discounts, a model that may not be right for Booking.com. The effort is to add to Ctrip customer base the middle to lower income customers from Didi ride sharing app and the Meituan app, through its partnerships with these companies. The experience of other travel sites such as Expedia in the Chinese market is poor, with price wars and Expedia selling its majority stake to Didi Chuxing. Expedia's CEO at the time calls it "the wild, wild east" because of the intense competition. About 130 million Chinese travelled overseas in 2017, up 7%, and spending $115 billion. ...