Why Biotech (gene therapy) investors are about to lose their shirts—shhh, don't tell J P Morgan

Not for the first time, investors behave like sheep

Not for the first time, investors behave like sheep

The dot-com bubble is a warning from history that investors can behave like sheep, and end up as lemmings, tumbling off a very high cliff. For those who don’t know, the dot-com bubble was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, between 1995 and its peak in March 2000. I was working for Vernalis at the time, a biotech company, as head of supply chain for the launch of frovatriptan.

A partner of the lady doing the marketing had moved to Guernsey to reduce his Dot-Com earnings tax exposure. That was just before the peak in early 2000. Needless to say, his fortune hit the rocks when the bubble burst.

The strange thing is that the whole bubble was very predictable, if you had taken a critical look at the state of the internet at the time. Access to the internet was via a telephone modem then, working at a mere 56 kbit/s. It could often take 2 minutes to open a single page—the grand ambition wasn’t matched by physical reality. As always hap…