Dot-com Bubble - Soaring Stocks

Soaring Stocks

In financial markets, a stock market bubble is a self-perpetuating rise or boom in the share prices of stocks of a particular industry. The term may be used with certainty only in retrospect when share prices have since crashed. A bubble occurs when speculators note the fast increase in value and decide to buy in anticipation of further rises, rather than because the shares are undervalued. Typically many companies thus become grossly overvalued. When the bubble "bursts," the share prices fall dramatically, and many companies go out of business.

American news media, including respected business publications such as Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, encouraged the public to invest in risky companies, despite many of the companies' disregard for basic financial and even legal principles.

Andrew Smith has argued that the Financial Industry's handling of Initial Public offerings tended to benefit the banks and initial investors rather than the company itself. This is because company staff were typically barred from reselling their shares for a lock-in period of 12 to 18 months and so did not benefit from the common pattern of a huge short-lived spike in the share price on the day of the launch. By contrast, the financiers and other initial investors were typically entitled to sell at the peak price, and so could immediately profit from short-term price rises. Smith argues that the high profitability of the IPOs to Wall Street was a significant factor the course of events of the bubble. He writes:

"...But did the kids dupe the establishment by drawing them into fake companies, or did the establishment dupe the kids by introducing them to Mammon and charging a commission on it?"

In spite of this, however, a few company founders made vast fortunes when their companies were bought out at an early stage in the dot-com stock market bubble. These early successes made the bubble even more buoyant. An unprecedented amount of personal investing occurred during the boom, and the press reported the phenomenon of people quitting their jobs to become full-time day traders.