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Considering the article hand-picked them from "the height of the dot-com boom", many of those 24 companies didn't do too badly.

TD Waterhouse - $76 billion

priceline.com - $24 billion

Juniper Networks - $22 billion

Agilent - $15 billion

Red Hat - $9 billion

Akamai - $7 billion

Ok, maybe they weren't great investments, and some went to zero, but as a group they weren't horrible.

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If you invested money equally in all the 1999 IPO companies, you would have less money now, 13 years later, than what you started with and thats not factoring in the time value of money.

Its a horrible investment in aggregate.

But what about relative performance against other equities?

EDITED: for politesse

Let alone if you invested in MSFT

TD Waterhouse was a subsidiary of TD bank. TD bought back TD Waterhouse. The successor company is TD Ameritrade, but I'm not sure how much of that is Waterhouse and how much is the old Ameritrade.

It's also tricky to look at market cap versus price. Many of these companies issued additional shares at low valuations. Priceline, for example, is at about where it traded right after the IPO--but its market cap has more than doubled.

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