Howard Pyle, The Burning of Jamestown, an early-twentieth-century illustration, not an eyewitness view. Public domain.
The dot-com market peaked in 2000 and then gave back the boom.
If money is tight, you may have missed the shares and still meet the layoffs when the stories fail.
If you are in the middle, a brokerage account that felt like found money can become a tuition plan that vanished.
If you have savings, buying a company because the website is famous is not an investment policy.
The Nasdaq peaked in March 2000.
It then fell for more than two years and gave back most of that climb, and many firms that had never earned a profit disappeared.
Households learned that a story about the future is not a cash flow.
Source: Market record of the March 2000 peak and the 2000-2002 decline.