It’s looking a lot like 2000 for the Nasdaq composite, which again hit 15-year intraday highs on Friday on the way to its second-straight record close.
A handful of major technology companies with strong quarterly earnings reports this week pushed the Nasdaq into record territory as the tech-heavy index touched 5,100 points during Friday trading — the highest it has reached since before the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. (It is important to note, though, that these records are not adjusted for the market’s inflation over the past 15 years.)
Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) all saw gains on Friday following strong earnings reports Thursday evening, spurring the Nasdaq’s rally to close out the week at 5,092. Not all of the Nasdaq’s gains came from the tech industry, though, as Starbucks (SBUX) shares rose Friday following the coffee chain’s own strong earnings, while Facebook (FB) was one of the few tech companies to see its shares dip this week after the social media giant’s revenue fell short of expectations.
As it stands, the Nasdaq is some 40 points away from 5,132 — the all-time high it reached in early-March 2000, shortly before the unsustainable gains of the Internet boom evaporated, leaving the Nasdaq at less than half its value within the year. The index has spent the past 15 years slowly climbing back to those 2000-era levels (again, minus inflation), as the index finally closed above the 5,000-point mark again just last month. The Nasdaq gained 13.4% last year and it has already gained 7.6% less than four full months into 2015.
Of course, despite what the Nasdaq ticker says, a lot has changed since 2000. For starters, though much of this week’s gains came from strong tech earnings, the tech-heavy Nasdaq isn’t quite as tech-heavy as it once was. Just 42% of the current Nasdaq companies hail from the technology industry, compared to nearly 65% in April of 2000, according to Reuters.
The total number of companies trading on the Nasdaq has dropped dramatically — from 4,715 in 2000 to 2,578 today — however, the collective value of the index’s companies has still managed to grow quite a bit in 15 years, jumping 24% to $8.2 trillion. Leading the way in terms of value is Apple (AAPL) with a market value of $755 billion, which easily outpaces the $525 billion market cap Microsoft sported back in 2000 (a value, for Microsoft, that has since dropped to $355 billion). Still, Microsoft’s 2000 market value would be enough to place the computing giant second on the current list of top-valued Nasdaq companies, comfortably between Apple and Google, which currently sits in second-place with a market cap of $375 billion.
