Member-only story
The sector that still hasn’t recovered from the 1999 dotcom bubble
It’s common for people to point to stocks that still haven’t recovered from the dot-com bubble era (which ended in 2000). You know the stocks: Cisco, Intel, GE, etc.
What is less known is that there was another bubble going on during the internet/tech/dot-com bubble. There was also a bubble in telecom at that time. Telecommunications includes companies like Verizon, AT&T, Charter Communications, Comcast, T-Mobile, etc.
Telecom went up and down very fast. Huge runup, then a huge crash. Telecom still hasn’t recovered when it comes to stock prices. Think of stocks like AT&T (Ticker Symbol: T).
What happened was that people got excited about these companies because they were the gateway to the internet (i.e. internet providers), even though they weren’t pure internet plays.
At least when it comes to the stock market, telecom was effectively demoted from a sector to an industry a few years ago.
