I wish someone would write a book about the dot-com bubble. It's long enough ago to be interesting, yet recent enough that most of the people involved are still alive and available for interviews.
I remember the years leading up to it. I was a kid really (okay, beginning my 30's) and my games were being published by a small company in California. At the trade shows I would often see this guy who was a friend of the publisher who was an amateur investor.
Every time we would catch up with him he would rattle off all the stock symbols he had bought that were on fire and making him bank. For my working-class upbringing, this market stuff was a strange world. He might as well be talking about pari-mutuel wagering (whatever that is).
Some years later when I heard that Netscape was about to go public I decided to see what this investing thing was all about. At that time there was a brokerage in downtown Lawrence, Kansas where you could pay a fee to place an order on a stock. Me and a few other nerds that had never invested in the market before each put a few hundred dollars we had toward Netscape.
With the stock priced at something like $28, I think I placed an order to buy if it was below $40 or something like that. By the end of the day I had learned that Netscape opened at over $40 and, while it dipped mid-day at some point, it never dipped quite below $40 and so I owned zero shares. A near miss?
So it was my first step in investing (or misstep). There would be more (missteps that is).
It was only years later when I was wiser that I realized that the guy who was picking the winners so well back in my trade-show days couldn't really lose — all the stocks were going up.
I love the scene at 19:48, where Larry Wachtel is more or less predicting the crash. The ironic thing is that the bubble kept growing for so long, that eventually even he was convinced that "this time it's different", invested in dotcom companies and lost a lot of money.
BobbyBroccoli on YouTube does an absolutely phenomenal job creating documentaries. Related to the dot-com burst would be the story he tells about Nortel.
