Decade Flashback

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As a good contrarian, I like to keep magazines which capture the zeitgeist of their day. Here are a couple from a decade ago, at the peak of the Internet bubble:

1012-fortune

One of the articles in Money magazine, whose cover is above on the right, is The Sensible Internet Portfolio. It lists six stocks that aren't so nutty as their peers. They are:

1012-sensible

Of the six above, four of them are delisted. I don't want to dig through bankruptcy proceedings or merger deals, but I think we can all safely agree that the four that have vanished had a substantial decline in value. As for the two you can still chart – ARBA and VRSN – I have put graphs here and here (no need to gobbling up your screen space with these things).

Am I suggesting the market is like early 2000 right now? No; the dot-gov bubble's lunacies are confined only to certain places. We're nowhere near the insanity of those days, although I do thing the systemic troubles are far worse.

My point is that it helps to keep perspective. One week from now we're going to know a whole lot more about the direction of the market than we do now. Because, frustrating as it has been, the push higher makes total sense from a charting perspective. However, if we continue to blow higher, right past the 1120 level, there are going to be a lot of confounded, frustrated, and much-poorer bears. If the balance of the week brings market action that slices us right through those lofty levels, we've all got some serious rethinking to do.