The dot com bubble....

Watching a Frontline documentary on the Dot-com bubble has made me realize that the Dot-com bubble was quite different than what I had assumed it to be.  As a person growing up in the late 1990's, I had always assumed that the blame for the bubble bursting rested solely in the speculative nature of the consumer stock holders, but the aptly named documentary, "Dot Con," opened my eyes up to the true culprits.  Investment bankers and venture capitalists saw the excitement in the market directed at the internet industry and saw an opportunity to make a lot of money.  By pushing internet start-ups towards an IPO and then selling the stock on the first day, these investors were able to use the hype surrounding internet stocks to cash in huge amounts of money. It is quite scary how much profit was had by these companies. On another note, the crash was not as bad as I assumed, as Wikipedia states that half of these companies survived well past the bursting of the Dot-com bubble.  Avoiding rampant speculation is a new goal of mine, I don't want to be in a similar situation.