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Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era
The Internet stock bubble wasn't just about goggle-eyed day traderstrying to get rich on the Nasdaq and goateed twenty-five-year-olds playing wannabe Bill Gates. It was also about an America that believed it had discovered the secret of eternal it said something about all of us, and what we thought about ourselves, as the twenty-first century dawned. John Cassidy's Dot.con brings this tumultuous episode to life. Moving from the Cold War Pentagon to Silicon Valley to Wall Street and into the homes of millions of Americans, Cassidy tells the story of the great boom and bust in an authoritative and entertaining narrative. Featuring all the iconic figures of the Internet era -- Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, Steve Case, Alan Greenspan, and many others -- and with a new Afterword on the aftermath of the bust, Dot.con is a panoramic and stirring account of human greed and gullibility.
416 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
133 people are currently reading
1505 people want to read
About the author
John Cassidy
52 books63 followersJohn Cassidy is a journalist at The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is the author of Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era and lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
February 23, 2020
This is a relatively interesting book and not poorly written. Indeed, for those who don’t remember or didn’t live through this period, I would likely be recommending it and giving it a higher rating. So my rating might be viewed as both subjective and somewhat unfair. However I feel I have a different take on the subject that gives me a different and possibly more comprehensive understanding with greater overall context that I have neither the time or energy to delve deeply into, which makes this content a little...basic and lacking a more complete historical insider perspective that I feel I posses.
I don’t want to write my own book here, but a little personal background info. I acquired my first computer in 1982, took my first programming class in 1984 and “got on the (pre-Web) Internet in 1985 when beginning to send and receive personal email. I quickly migrated to both BBS’s and used other Internet protocols (email is one) such as ftp, telnet (especially), the primary search tool, Gopher, and what kind of served as a pre-Web before the Web was invented by TBL — Usenet. I also got on the legendary and influential WELL, where I resided and interacted with many movers and shakers for close to 15 years. (One of my biggest regrets is giving up my longtime WELL email address.) With the introduction of the Web, I quickly learned HTML, opened my own consulting company in Beverly Hills and created small basic websites for companies using HTML 1.0 (and VRML, as well as other forgotten markup languages and scripts) with the text-only Lynx browser, charging $350 per web PAGE because with 100 international web servers then, back then there was no one to provide such services and you could just name your price. When the GUI Mosaic browser soon came out, things just exploded. I was already doing work with many ISPs and other Internet companies and got involved with the IETF to help create Internet protocols. I turned down awesome offers from companies like Oracle, Sun, Nike, Adobe, Apple and more to take much less to join a growing ISP I was betting would go big time, which turned out to be a good bet. During my time there, I helped grow the company into the 2nd largest ISP in the world, built my own Engineering department, worked in the largest data center on the west coast, traveled the country as the company’s sole rep for RFP bidder meetings and much more, as well as collaborating with NASA, Cal Tech and various national research labs (LBL was one) on several major projects and again, much more. Early on, we were idealistically (and naively) scaling the Internet, investing in massive redundancy, educating consumers and businesses, and trying to theoretically even the playing field by providing free access to education, information, technology, and social improvement efforts and opportunities for everyone in the world. I also spent a lot of time researching new technologies, such as the then-unnamed cloud technology that a decade later would become all the rage, as well as researching competitors and potentially interesting new tech/Internet companies to
(personally) invest in.
Yet before the end of the century, many of we “old timers” were starting to feel nervous about the future and where things could lead, especially as the Web became more commercial with tons of new companies having IPOs, creating tons of overnight millionaires with companies that Wall Street had decided were somehow valued at many millions while virtually none were making ANY revenue, let alone profits, and while “experts” assumed there would somehow be ways to make big money, only the porn industry (and offshore gambling) were successful in doing so while people in the industry had no concrete ideas of their own on what to sell (everything had been free) and how to make real money. As the government gave up domain management (to begin with) and commercial entities moved in, I started to develop a queasy feeling in my stomach over what *could* happen in the future.
Soon many of we "veterans" starting worrying the public valuations were insane, it would take awhile as well as major changes for anyone to actually succeed, and concerns about things possibly getting "darker" as our ideals faded. Of course there had always been hackers, but old school hackers did it to 1) learn (and “free” information) and 2) for bragging rights. Even though the government threw the book at infamous hackers like Poulson and Mitnick, none one were *truly* criminals in the sense that "hackers/crackers" would later become. Security became a major headache since TCP/IP packet switching had not been invented to support major financial transactions securely. As the number of viruses being created and released daily started to beat Moore’s Law exponentially, as more commercial companies got online, as more tech companies started up with nothing to sell, financial analysts, shareholders, and certain geeks in the tech/Internet industry started saying “No" and "I told you so” while VC money started drying up - the bust became predictably inevitable. Many of us in the industry unloaded our stock options while they still had value and started bailing on companies (I left less than a year before the Bust started demolishing the industry) and then it happened and everyone who had invested heavily in Internet stocks (like my parents years before on my advice) lost entire fortunes while company after company became forgotten historical footnotes.
A final observation. None of the original inventors of the ARPANET (like at Xerox PARC) and our 2nd generation who made this happen ever imagined in their/our worst nightmares what would become of their idealistically great inventions and efforts. Back in early Web days, spam was the outrage of the tech world and considered by some to act as viruses. Today, identity theft, kiddie porn, human trafficking, cyber warfare??? No. For several years I’ve become more and more concerned and regretful of what became of my efforts and when talking with other old friends and colleagues around the world, many share the same disappointment, disillusionment and regrets and I’ve spent much of the past three years trying to get myself and my digital footprints offline as much as possible. I’ve closed hundreds of online accounts and closed virtually all of my social network accounts and I hope to soon be almost entirely off the Net, aside from an email address and a couple of other things - and now here I went and wrote way too much, so I apologize. I could actually write infinitely more. But as for this Dot.Con book, like I said, it’s not bad and addresses a short but major part of our recent history. I should give it a higher rating. It’s just that I know this stuff, predicted this stuff, could go far further in depth if I had the time and energy, and feel like this offered me, personally, little. However, as I previously implied, if you didn’t live through this or don’t know the history, it’s probably a valuable book and worth 4 stars. Thus recommended for people who don’t know this (but if you do, I wouldn’t recommend it)...
I don’t want to write my own book here, but a little personal background info. I acquired my first computer in 1982, took my first programming class in 1984 and “got on the (pre-Web) Internet in 1985 when beginning to send and receive personal email. I quickly migrated to both BBS’s and used other Internet protocols (email is one) such as ftp, telnet (especially), the primary search tool, Gopher, and what kind of served as a pre-Web before the Web was invented by TBL — Usenet. I also got on the legendary and influential WELL, where I resided and interacted with many movers and shakers for close to 15 years. (One of my biggest regrets is giving up my longtime WELL email address.) With the introduction of the Web, I quickly learned HTML, opened my own consulting company in Beverly Hills and created small basic websites for companies using HTML 1.0 (and VRML, as well as other forgotten markup languages and scripts) with the text-only Lynx browser, charging $350 per web PAGE because with 100 international web servers then, back then there was no one to provide such services and you could just name your price. When the GUI Mosaic browser soon came out, things just exploded. I was already doing work with many ISPs and other Internet companies and got involved with the IETF to help create Internet protocols. I turned down awesome offers from companies like Oracle, Sun, Nike, Adobe, Apple and more to take much less to join a growing ISP I was betting would go big time, which turned out to be a good bet. During my time there, I helped grow the company into the 2nd largest ISP in the world, built my own Engineering department, worked in the largest data center on the west coast, traveled the country as the company’s sole rep for RFP bidder meetings and much more, as well as collaborating with NASA, Cal Tech and various national research labs (LBL was one) on several major projects and again, much more. Early on, we were idealistically (and naively) scaling the Internet, investing in massive redundancy, educating consumers and businesses, and trying to theoretically even the playing field by providing free access to education, information, technology, and social improvement efforts and opportunities for everyone in the world. I also spent a lot of time researching new technologies, such as the then-unnamed cloud technology that a decade later would become all the rage, as well as researching competitors and potentially interesting new tech/Internet companies to
(personally) invest in.
Yet before the end of the century, many of we “old timers” were starting to feel nervous about the future and where things could lead, especially as the Web became more commercial with tons of new companies having IPOs, creating tons of overnight millionaires with companies that Wall Street had decided were somehow valued at many millions while virtually none were making ANY revenue, let alone profits, and while “experts” assumed there would somehow be ways to make big money, only the porn industry (and offshore gambling) were successful in doing so while people in the industry had no concrete ideas of their own on what to sell (everything had been free) and how to make real money. As the government gave up domain management (to begin with) and commercial entities moved in, I started to develop a queasy feeling in my stomach over what *could* happen in the future.
Soon many of we "veterans" starting worrying the public valuations were insane, it would take awhile as well as major changes for anyone to actually succeed, and concerns about things possibly getting "darker" as our ideals faded. Of course there had always been hackers, but old school hackers did it to 1) learn (and “free” information) and 2) for bragging rights. Even though the government threw the book at infamous hackers like Poulson and Mitnick, none one were *truly* criminals in the sense that "hackers/crackers" would later become. Security became a major headache since TCP/IP packet switching had not been invented to support major financial transactions securely. As the number of viruses being created and released daily started to beat Moore’s Law exponentially, as more commercial companies got online, as more tech companies started up with nothing to sell, financial analysts, shareholders, and certain geeks in the tech/Internet industry started saying “No" and "I told you so” while VC money started drying up - the bust became predictably inevitable. Many of us in the industry unloaded our stock options while they still had value and started bailing on companies (I left less than a year before the Bust started demolishing the industry) and then it happened and everyone who had invested heavily in Internet stocks (like my parents years before on my advice) lost entire fortunes while company after company became forgotten historical footnotes.
A final observation. None of the original inventors of the ARPANET (like at Xerox PARC) and our 2nd generation who made this happen ever imagined in their/our worst nightmares what would become of their idealistically great inventions and efforts. Back in early Web days, spam was the outrage of the tech world and considered by some to act as viruses. Today, identity theft, kiddie porn, human trafficking, cyber warfare??? No. For several years I’ve become more and more concerned and regretful of what became of my efforts and when talking with other old friends and colleagues around the world, many share the same disappointment, disillusionment and regrets and I’ve spent much of the past three years trying to get myself and my digital footprints offline as much as possible. I’ve closed hundreds of online accounts and closed virtually all of my social network accounts and I hope to soon be almost entirely off the Net, aside from an email address and a couple of other things - and now here I went and wrote way too much, so I apologize. I could actually write infinitely more. But as for this Dot.Con book, like I said, it’s not bad and addresses a short but major part of our recent history. I should give it a higher rating. It’s just that I know this stuff, predicted this stuff, could go far further in depth if I had the time and energy, and feel like this offered me, personally, little. However, as I previously implied, if you didn’t live through this or don’t know the history, it’s probably a valuable book and worth 4 stars. Thus recommended for people who don’t know this (but if you do, I wouldn’t recommend it)...
October 14, 2008
I was afraid that this book was going to be annoying and only slightly informative, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was the other way around.
It was particularly interesting to be reading this as the world is experiencing the effects of another investment bubble (especially the author's optimistic prediction in the afterword, written in 2002, that another crash would be decades away).
It was particularly interesting to be reading this as the world is experiencing the effects of another investment bubble (especially the author's optimistic prediction in the afterword, written in 2002, that another crash would be decades away).
March 2, 2022
I read this book around 2011 and in hindsight I can see I was shaped by this book in very odd and profound ways.
What rung out to me was the pure cynicism of the author to the business ideas put forward by a lot of the dot com boom founders. And yes. A lot of them were trash (Pets.com makes a lot of appearances).
But this book was written just after the dot com crash. It ended on a pessimistic note on where the internet would go and what would happen.
I remember Netflix making an appearance. In 99/2000 it was a DVD lending company, but received attention for its plans to deliver video over the internet. The author wrote this off as pure science fiction. And granted, the internet infrastructure at the time couldn't handle video on demand.
But as I was reading it in 2010/11 Netflix was booming. They'd just executed their viral free trial campaign amongst millennials in the UK, and it looked like Netflix and general cord cutting was going to stay.
eBay and Amazon were given similar forecasts of doom. Yet here we are today decrying Jeff Bezos' extreme wealth. Also eBay isn't going away any time soon.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb talked about a series of essays that transformed how he saw the world — a series of foreign dispatches in Germany in the late 30s. What struck him was how clear World War 2 was in hindsight, but how blind the journalists were to that event happening looking forward. It strongly influenced how he viewed uncertainty and people's inability to make predictions.
I'm no Taleb, but I feel something similar with this book. I can understand anyone's scepticism of the internet after the dot com boom.
And it was so eloquently argued.
But it was dead wrong.
And anyone who read the book and divested themselves from stock in Amazon, Yahoo, eBay or gasp Apple, is either kicking themselves or has found some Yoda like zen to deal with it.
The future is uncertain. It also historically has gotten better. Most doom prophesying non fiction books sell well that year, but not ten years later. The dystopic sci-fi books that keep selling well are less warnings of the future, but more enduring accurate mirrors of current society (1984, Brave New World, We).
Like I said. This book really affected me. Which means, even though I gave it 3 stars back then, I'm going to update it to 5 stars. Not because it's a 5 star book. It's 3 stars in terms of its writing in my opinion, but because it changed my life.
What rung out to me was the pure cynicism of the author to the business ideas put forward by a lot of the dot com boom founders. And yes. A lot of them were trash (Pets.com makes a lot of appearances).
But this book was written just after the dot com crash. It ended on a pessimistic note on where the internet would go and what would happen.
I remember Netflix making an appearance. In 99/2000 it was a DVD lending company, but received attention for its plans to deliver video over the internet. The author wrote this off as pure science fiction. And granted, the internet infrastructure at the time couldn't handle video on demand.
But as I was reading it in 2010/11 Netflix was booming. They'd just executed their viral free trial campaign amongst millennials in the UK, and it looked like Netflix and general cord cutting was going to stay.
eBay and Amazon were given similar forecasts of doom. Yet here we are today decrying Jeff Bezos' extreme wealth. Also eBay isn't going away any time soon.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb talked about a series of essays that transformed how he saw the world — a series of foreign dispatches in Germany in the late 30s. What struck him was how clear World War 2 was in hindsight, but how blind the journalists were to that event happening looking forward. It strongly influenced how he viewed uncertainty and people's inability to make predictions.
I'm no Taleb, but I feel something similar with this book. I can understand anyone's scepticism of the internet after the dot com boom.
And it was so eloquently argued.
But it was dead wrong.
And anyone who read the book and divested themselves from stock in Amazon, Yahoo, eBay or gasp Apple, is either kicking themselves or has found some Yoda like zen to deal with it.
The future is uncertain. It also historically has gotten better. Most doom prophesying non fiction books sell well that year, but not ten years later. The dystopic sci-fi books that keep selling well are less warnings of the future, but more enduring accurate mirrors of current society (1984, Brave New World, We).
Like I said. This book really affected me. Which means, even though I gave it 3 stars back then, I'm going to update it to 5 stars. Not because it's a 5 star book. It's 3 stars in terms of its writing in my opinion, but because it changed my life.
April 27, 2022
Picked up this book at a second hand bookstore dirt cheap out of curiosity but was ultimately unable to connect with it, and ended up skimming it. I thought this would be genuinely interesting in a novel way, but when I went through its pages I felt nothing but fatigue due to the amount of information. There are names of individuals and companies that pop up during various stages of development that got too difficult to follow. I think I would have enjoyed this if the focus was more from a specific person's point of view such as Greenspan or Meeker. The one incident that I really remembered was the Mark Barton shooting in Atlanta, which got me googling from the intricate details, but otherwise the rest of the book was rather unremarkable for me. It comes to life at a few points, but most of it was a slog for me. For a story that claims to be about greed and people, it felt overly focused on businesses and the economy as a whole .
I guess I didn't know why I was picking this book up to begin with. I honestly don't dislike this as it wasn't exactly frustrating to read (by most standards the writing is excellent), and it probably has important lessons to impart. But if I weren't interested in the details of the corporations and moguls involved, the important pointers could have been easily summarized in a news article. It just felt like a convoluted historical lesson that I was not able to connect to my own being and context.
I guess I didn't know why I was picking this book up to begin with. I honestly don't dislike this as it wasn't exactly frustrating to read (by most standards the writing is excellent), and it probably has important lessons to impart. But if I weren't interested in the details of the corporations and moguls involved, the important pointers could have been easily summarized in a news article. It just felt like a convoluted historical lesson that I was not able to connect to my own being and context.
July 17, 2019
It was fantastic and fast read..the author has told the story of the dot com boom and bust in authentic tone as a spectator..only in the epilogue does he voice his opinion and judges the actors.. otherwise in the main story, he has been a pure narrator of events without giving into his biases and opinions.. Excellent refresher for those who lived through those times..
December 11, 2010
Mr. Cassidy writes an excellent historical account of the dot.com bust. He spices the historical information with good descriptions of why certain things were done according to "business rules." Having worked for a defunct .com myself, I found this book to be quite informative about the one end of business all the technicians and developers didn't want to know about -- the cash flow. Looking back, many of the warning signs that Mr. Cassidy notes were there for all of us in the company to have seen...if we had known what to look for. An excellent work on a piece of history we should all study much closer.
August 20, 2024
The full five because of how revelatory it is of the original irrationalities and interdependence of stock markets, Internet businesses and their gurus that still affect the world today, and Cassidy does so despite writing before the existence of MySpace, the 2008 GFC, Uber… etc. People talk about Pets.Com with rolling eyes but the facts of the book show that more or less the exact same dynamic plays out today with AI!
The introductory chapters are full of interesting facts and the running commentary all the way up to 2001 is so thorough yet effectively in service of the story. One of those books I could have read at any point in the last 15 years and would probably have benefitted immensely from.
The introductory chapters are full of interesting facts and the running commentary all the way up to 2001 is so thorough yet effectively in service of the story. One of those books I could have read at any point in the last 15 years and would probably have benefitted immensely from.
December 25, 2024
Libertarian tech bozos love to say “run government like a business.” Maybe they should start by figuring out how to run Silicon Valley like a profitable one.
March 6, 2018
Well written and easy to read overview of the 90’d internet bubble. Very cool to learn about the history of the internet as a whole, from academic concept to mass adoption. Majority of the book is lead up to the crash, with just one chapter discussing the aftermath; wish it went further, especially re:housing crisis of 07/08. Nevertheless an informative and interesting nonfiction read for one who doesn’t explore the genre enough.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 4, 2024
What a great read on how the world wide web was created, the different browsers used, the forums that were invented, and how developers were trying to make money from their products. It also contains an introduction to the financial markets.
Read
December 25, 2024I was just a middle schooler during the dot com boom. Reading this in 2024 was a trip to see how people collectively lost their minds during that time, a time where fledgling dot com companies were worth more than airlines, multimedia empires, etc. New business school grads with an idea and a .com after their business name suddenly had access to tons of cash via the stock market boom, even though their company was new, unproven, and not profitable (sometimes even incurring huge losses). Millionaires were created overnight.
There were some companies that made it out of that craziness (Amazon being the most successful - the author wrote this in 2002 and I don't think he foresaw how big Amazon would become), but there are other companies worth billions during that era that I can't even remember now. Cassidy lays the blame on the media and banks that bought into this speculative bubble (the banks made millions launching these IPOs to naive investors), Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and the unadulterated greed of the American people.
There were some companies that made it out of that craziness (Amazon being the most successful - the author wrote this in 2002 and I don't think he foresaw how big Amazon would become), but there are other companies worth billions during that era that I can't even remember now. Cassidy lays the blame on the media and banks that bought into this speculative bubble (the banks made millions launching these IPOs to naive investors), Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and the unadulterated greed of the American people.
April 25, 2018
This book was fantastic. It telks the story of the dot.com bubble that engulfed the USA from 1995 to 2000. It highlights how companies making phenomenal losses with no track record were being valued at billions of dollars! From an investment point of view it shows that investing in a good idea or trend with no solud financials is not a good idea! Other interesting points were America’s arrogance at it’s rising economy, Alan Greenspan’s inability to make definitive decisions to stop the general crash afterwards and the sensational rubbish printed by the media that help fuel the fire. A compelling read.
March 2, 2021
This was a fascinating read. The first third of the book was an interesting history of the internet starting with the invention of the vacuum tube. There are some cool behind the scenes chapters on big names in the early web: Netscape, Yahoo!, and Amazon.com. The author does a great job of charting the stock market stuff without getting too deep in the weeds. And as with all good books like this, he does a great job of focusing on a few key figures to give the events a human face.
Something that really made this book enjoyable was thinking about the these events in context of the two decades since they've happened. A fun book overall.
Something that really made this book enjoyable was thinking about the these events in context of the two decades since they've happened. A fun book overall.
December 23, 2025
I've been looking for a good book that covers the dot com crash of 2000 and I can say that this is the definitive book if you're interested in that saga. Pets.com (check) Webvan (check) Lucent Technologies (check) and many more that I had never even heard of.
Despite the sensational title, this is actually a well-written, information-dense, and non-biased account of the big crash of 2000. Written in 2002 not long after the dot com implosion, a lot of the run up to the crash rings eerily similar to today (substitute Internet with AI). We'll see if history rhymes.
Despite the sensational title, this is actually a well-written, information-dense, and non-biased account of the big crash of 2000. Written in 2002 not long after the dot com implosion, a lot of the run up to the crash rings eerily similar to today (substitute Internet with AI). We'll see if history rhymes.
November 27, 2025
3.5 stars / Enjoyed this book because I learned a ton about the time period that I did not know. It was really interesting to learn about the boom and ballooning of the bubble. However, I didn’t find it to be that well written, and it felt pretty outdated. Too heavy on the numbers as well. I was more interested in the narrative element than the markets being up and down X% on which days. By the end, I was definitely skimming those pieces.
September 26, 2021
Fast paced read that lets you revisit the build up to the dot com boom and subsequent crash. While history doesn’t always repeat, it’s good to know an event by event account of those days and identify trends that show suspiciously close resemblance to the current times. It’s also good to know about those who survived and what made them different from others, apart from just plain luck.
January 29, 2025
Fascinating. As someone who was not really conscious at the time of the dot com bubble, it was crazy to read how everything went down. The book has a lot of information and players to follow, if you are into tech news then it should be right up your alley. As someone who works in tech, this was a hard book to put down.
I also appreciate the irony of buying the book from Amazon😂
I also appreciate the irony of buying the book from Amazon😂
April 15, 2025
I'm a self diagnosed luddite and I understood the prose and the point of the book. The topic would not interest me at all weren't it for research. However, thanks to the writing style and the examples used. I found it doable. What fascinated me most was how the sentences "history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme" and "every time history repeats itself, the price goes up" come together.
July 30, 2025
Extremely informative overview of the 90s dot.com market crash. I’d recommend to anyone interested in learning more about market bubbles & speculation. As this was written right after the crash it is fairly pessimistic regarding the future of the internet & disregards that there are some winners out of the dot.com (Amazon, eBay)
November 27, 2025
Having lived through the period of the early internet, it was refreshing to see it neatly collated in this breezily written book. Looking back at the world of Netscape, Yahoo! and Webvan is kinda fun, though there were some painful reminders of awfulness. Meeker, Cramer and Blodget weren't bad people, they simply got sucked in. As did many of us. A tale of human frailty, eruditely written.
February 25, 2022
Great historical account of the dot com era. See some early similarities with the current crypto hype.
Must read for anyone who likes to get an insight on speculative bubbles and short term exaggeration of technological advancement...
Must read for anyone who likes to get an insight on speculative bubbles and short term exaggeration of technological advancement...
April 10, 2021
Great lesson for today’s super hot valuation.
January 3, 2022
Excellent history of the dot.com boom / bust of the 1990s.
October 4, 2023
okay - mostly read for work project
December 31, 2024
Good record of the dotcom bubble and markets
May 18, 2025
Drags a little bit towards the end but very informative and a great read
August 17, 2025
Cool snapshot of the 90s. Maybe history repeats with an AI bubble, surely not...
September 21, 2025
Very informative but also slow. Idk if I’d recommend tbh.
May 15, 2011
It's especially fascinating to read now as it seems likely we'll have to refer to the events in this book as the first internet bubble. The new bubble at least would primarily wipe out venture capital investments- though I'm suspicious that if enough money was tied up in VC then the consequences of a crash could be bad for the rest of us in as in the way of the 'shadow banking system' of a few years ago was.
Valuations of companies derived from the share price when only 10% of shares are available for public purchase seems wrong: why can't I create a company with a 100 billion shares owned by myself, offer only a single share in the IPO, and find one person to pay $10 for it- now I'm a trillionaire? Valuation using that simplistic model doesn't make sense for highly assymetrical distribution of shares or even any good or service. The greater amount of something held relative to the amount available for sale, the more the total real value of it has to be discounted. Maybe this already exists?
"Most day traders were well educated. It took a certain level of intelligence and arrogance to persuade yourself that you could trade successfully against Wall Street professionals who had been doing it all their working lives" The chapter later mentions a study which showed that average returns from stock trading at a set of brokerages went down as the frequency of trades went up- a lot of that due to per-trade fees.
Valuations of companies derived from the share price when only 10% of shares are available for public purchase seems wrong: why can't I create a company with a 100 billion shares owned by myself, offer only a single share in the IPO, and find one person to pay $10 for it- now I'm a trillionaire? Valuation using that simplistic model doesn't make sense for highly assymetrical distribution of shares or even any good or service. The greater amount of something held relative to the amount available for sale, the more the total real value of it has to be discounted. Maybe this already exists?
"Most day traders were well educated. It took a certain level of intelligence and arrogance to persuade yourself that you could trade successfully against Wall Street professionals who had been doing it all their working lives" The chapter later mentions a study which showed that average returns from stock trading at a set of brokerages went down as the frequency of trades went up- a lot of that due to per-trade fees.
May 27, 2024
As someone who loves numbers and statistical analysis I loved this book. John Cassidy didn’t make any outlandish claims, he simply aggregated the information and data of how the Internet was formed, how it spread, how many different people were able to capitalize on it, and how its downfall was obvious to everyone playing the game of hot potato, unsure of who would be the last sucker to buy in to the Internet bubble.
His explanation of how valuation methods completely detached themselves from traditional methods but still found validity in their claims to assure new investors (what mattered were eye balls on your product, not sales) was interesting and profound.
I didn’t live through any of the events leading up to the stock market crash of 2001, and as a result I was previously forced to look at the past through the perspective of a 2024 finance student. Cassidy changed this for me by writing this book like a story, from the perspective of an omnipresent god watching over everyone like little rats working the machine all trying to get rich. It was super enlightening and made me feel like I lived through it myself, both entertaining and informative! Exactly what I was looking for
His explanation of how valuation methods completely detached themselves from traditional methods but still found validity in their claims to assure new investors (what mattered were eye balls on your product, not sales) was interesting and profound.
I didn’t live through any of the events leading up to the stock market crash of 2001, and as a result I was previously forced to look at the past through the perspective of a 2024 finance student. Cassidy changed this for me by writing this book like a story, from the perspective of an omnipresent god watching over everyone like little rats working the machine all trying to get rich. It was super enlightening and made me feel like I lived through it myself, both entertaining and informative! Exactly what I was looking for
Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews