When was the dot.com bust

It established a large base of users, partly by not syndicating fares to other travel sites. In the s most Southwest passengers booked online. They filed for bankruptcy five years later. By the s, this 19th century printing firm had become a discount bookseller advertising on TV; by the s they were selling through mail-order catalogs and online services.

In they followed Amazon. One of the first financial information portals on the Web, quote. List of Partners vendors. The dotcom bubble was a rapid rise in U.

The value of equity markets grew exponentially during this period, with the technology-dominated Nasdaq index rising from under 1, to more than 5, between the years and Things started to change in , and the bubble burst between and with equities entering a bear market.

The crash that followed saw the Nasdaq index, which rose five-fold between and , tumble from a peak of 5, By the end of , most dotcom stocks went bust. It would take 15 years for the Nasdaq to regain its peak, which it did on April 24, The dotcom bubble, also known as the Internet bubble, grew out of a combination of the presence of speculative or fad-based investing, the abundance of venture capital funding for startups , and the failure of dotcoms to turn a profit.

Investors poured money into Internet startups during the s hoping they would one day become profitable. Many investors and venture capitalists abandoned a cautious approach for fear of not being able to cash in on the growing use of the Internet.

With capital markets throwing money at the sector, start-ups were in a race to quickly get big. Companies without any proprietary technology abandoned fiscal responsibility. They spent a fortune on marketing to establish brands that would set them apart from the competition. Speculative bubbles are notoriously hard to recognize while happening, but seem obvious after they burst.

Record amounts of capital started flowing into the Nasdaq in That year, most of the initial public offerings IPOs were related to Internet companies, followed by 91 in the first quarter of alone. The high-water mark was the AOL Time Warner megamerger in January , which became the biggest merger failure in history.

The bubble ultimately burst, leaving many investors facing steep losses and several Internet companies going bust. Companies that famously survived the bubble include Amazon , eBay, and Priceline. The dotcom bubble is but one of several asset bubbles that have appeared over the past centuries. The s was a period of rapid technological advancement in many areas.

But it was the commercialization of the Internet that led to the greatest expansion of capital growth the country ever saw. Although high-tech standard-bearers, such as Intel, Cisco, and Oracle, were driving organic growth in the technology sector, it was upstart dotcom companies that fueled the stock market surge that began in The bubble that formed over the next five years was fed by cheap money, easy capital, market overconfidence, and pure speculation.

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Stagflation, Reincarnated October 14, Interview with Mr. Shaheen H. Al-Ghanem, Chief Executive… September 3, Accelerating the Digital Transformation Journey November 10, Twenty years ago today, the dotcom bubble officially burst, ending a period of rampant hype and investment into technology stocks with a bang, and many whimpers.

In the mid-to-late s, as access to the World Wide Web became more common around the world, all eyes turned to internet-based companies as the future of commerce, leading to excessive market speculation, reckless "fad" investments and an intense focus on marketing over substance. Loose wallets and the desire to grow startups extremely fast helped to fuel the boom, pushing the Nasdaq to an all-time high of But the good times were not to last.

By October the market had lost more than 75 percent of its value. Dotcom businesses once listed as potential cash cows, like Pets. Others from the era, notably Amazon and eBay, managed to cling on.