There's a lot of public wealth caught up in the stock market in general right now. Technology is especially overvalued (e.g. Amazon at $150Bn, Yelp and Pandora at $5Bn, etc.) despite having more earnings than bubble v1.0. But even if you believe that the downside of a tech crash is limited, you're forgetting that technology is unlikely to crash without dragging down the entire market -- the same forces that are propping up tech are propping up everything else.

Moreover, people keep talking about hedge funds as if they're completely dissociated from the larger market. But a lot of pension, retirement and other "conservative" wealth has been flooding into these funds seeking a return over the last few years. Grandma's retirement not isolated from the health of the tech industry; it's just harder for journalists to see the risk this time, because it doesn't look like last time.

Remember: This Time It's Different! (tm)

This is an amusing statement in light of the fact that the largest IPO in history (Alibaba) took place last week.

Alibaba has a PE ratio one tenth of amazon - and is already a profitable company. This is the exact opposite of what a bubble is.

This is not at all like the kind of IPOs leading to the 2000 crash.

That said, Alibaba's profitability and PE ratio compared to Amazon is meaningless in the context of a bubble discussion. A bubble does not merely consist of unprofitable companies becoming ridiculously valued; it consists of profitable companies becoming more highly valued than their fundamentals can support.

If Amazon's stock price fell by 25%, and Alibaba's did the same, as an Alibaba shareholder would you take comfort in the fact that Alibaba still has a PE ratio one tenth Amazon's? Of course not.

Actually, yes, I would take comfort in that fact. It would mean that Alibaba was far more likely to recover its value.

You seem to misunderstand what the PE ratio actually represents.

As an experiment, I'd suggest you test your hypothesis against actual market data. Hint: you will have no problem finding stocks with higher than industry average PE ratios pre-2008 crash that have significantly outperformed their lower PE ratio counterparts since the market bottom in 2009.

Anyway, the VC bubble will not pop alone. It'll take stocks with it (or the other way around), and people will suffer worldwide again.

There have been close to 200 IPOs this year. How many people here can, by memory alone, name more than 10?

I'm not at all arguing that the IPO market of 2014 is the IPO market of 2000 reincarnated (it absolutely isn't), but anecdotal analyses that boil down to "it was crazier in 2000!" aren't very meaningful.

Insofar as "splashy" is mostly a factor of media attention in the runup, there being fewer splashy IPOs might itself contribute directly to the splashy IPOs that do exist being bigger (there's other contributors, too -- if the media isn't as prone to drive attention to every tech IPO, it means the IPOs that are splashy are likely splashy because of some fundamental newsworthy feature, which often includes things like strength in the fundamentals or the amount of money sought to be raised, that is, IPOs have to be set-up to be bigger to be splashy.)

Definitely. The hiring market in our industry is _on fire_ right now, we are treated well, paid fairly, etc. When the hard times come, it might be a little less cushy to be an engineer/data scientist.

I disagree with this (and it's certainly not my experience). If you put in these hours, on average you'll likely be better compensated, but you can very much make quite a lot of money in the objective and relative (to everyone else) sense without putting in absurd hours.