What a fun and quick read that was. Glassman and Hassett spent the first half of this book from 1999 spouting gibberish about companies being in their ‘adolescence’ and making up terms like PRP (perfectly reasonable price). It was fun to have the advantage of hindsight as they extoll the greatness of GE then, as it sits now about $3.38 away from being considered a ‘penny stock’ (stocks below $5). Reassuring readers that the great AOL was fine to have a P/E of 391 (the prudent high-end for a tech stock maybe being 40). Many other tech names that blew up never to be heard from again a year after they wrote this.

All the experts that came on TV after the tech bubble popped explaining how they saw it coming (then why didn’t you warn anyone?). To be fair to the authors they could not have been expected to foresee the other two minefields of the decade, 9/11 and 08’s Global Financial Crisis. Nevertheless it was a blast to have “experts” (and a publisher who paid for this mess) display such colossal ignorance. It makes me feel not quite so stupid for all the mistakes I make in the market.

[When this book was written in 1999 the DOW was at 9,000. It peaked in January of this year at about 26,600. It promptly sank and today sits at 25,289. So, 20 years later we are not quite having tripled in 2018, what they predicted to have quadrupled by 2005.]