1999 The Markets

It was love at first website.

The 'Information Age" became the Age of the Internet.

It was the year of Internet, Infrastructure, and IPOs. "TMT".

With the emerging markets crisis over, the markets moved on.

Interest cuts not only kept the world from imploding, the money flowed to "TMT" ("Telecom Media Tech"). Spectrum, fiber optics, chips, software, and websites ruled.

Initial Public Offerings, IPOs, were the way to enjoy the story. Hundreds of companies "went public", raising billions.

1996 872 IPOs, 49.9B

1997 630 IPOs, 43.3B

1998 373 IPOs, 36.5B

1999 546 IPOs, 69.2B

One of the biggest IPO day first-day returns was one of the first IPOs of 1999.

MarketWatch, a media site, on January 15, IPO'd at $17, and closed the day at $97.50, up 474%. (It was as high as $130 intraday.) Its value was $1.1B, with a reported loss of $8.2M, revenue of $4.5M over the first 9 months of 1998.

The TMT market boom getting started. The IPO after-party was getting hotter. Nobody wanted to leave.

Companies like Qualcomm went up 25X. Even "large cap" companies were at the party, some with 10X returns. The money moved on from older slow businesses to the stories about the future.

Internet startups for everything were everywhere - "dot.com" was part of the brand rechristening of everything.

Goldman Sachs. Martha Stewart. Word Wrestling Federation. UPS, which delivered all the packages ordered online, went public.

The average first day gains were 68% (the previous year was "only" 23%.)

One of the biggest IPO days was one of the last IPOs of 1999.

VA Linux's IPO was in December, with a 733% first day gain. Microsoft, was in the middle of an antitrust case. Linux was an infrastructure story of an open source future.

The party seemed like it would go on forever, into the future.