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Comment by sosborn | Hacker News Reader

A great example is the DotCom bubble. Wiped out a lot of capital but it really did transform the world.

But also, a lot of the dot com companies that people invested in in 1999 went bust, meaning those specific investments went to zero even if the web as a whole was a huge success financially.

Sure...that's why it's important to diversify investments. For every Pets.com, hopefully you have a Google in your portfolio.

Or, you skip all that and just put it all in an S&P 500 fund.

I started working in 1997 and lived through the dot com bubble and collapse. My advice to people is to diversify away from your company stock. I knew a lot of people at Cisco that had stock options at $80 and it dropped to under $20.

Because of the way the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) worked at the time they bought the stock, did not sell, but owed taxes on the gain on the day of purchase. They had tax bills of over $1 million but even if they sold it all they couldn't pay the bill. This dragged on for years.

I heard of stories like that!

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-13-mn-50476...

That lesson is part of why I dump my company's shares the first chance I get.

The person in the story is literally the person at Cisco I was talking about. I worked on 2 projects with him. Great engineer.

But you would not have had Google in you portfolio.

The bubble burst in 2000-2001, Google IPO was in 2004.

The S&P500 also did not do very well at the time.

That is the problem with bubbles.

Yeah, but unlike LLMs the Internet was an actual useful technology.

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