Irrational Exuberance

The late 1990s didn’t feel like a boom — they felt like permission. Permission to believe that gravity no longer applied, that losses were temporary, and that every idea with a dot-com at the end was destined to change the world.

Money appeared faster than logic, valuations outran reality, and optimism became a substitute for discipline. 

We didn’t think we were being reckless.

We thought we were being visionary. 

And for a brief, intoxicating moment, everyone was right — until suddenly, no one was.

* * *

Everyone who walked into my office had a stock tip and a success story.

David, the printer across the street, bragged that his AOL shares had doubled overnight. Alex, my graphic designer, couldn’t stop talking about Apple.

It felt like nobody was actually working anymore — they were all trading. The market wasn’t something people invested in. It was something they lived inside.

At the center of that frenzy stood Harvey Houtkin, widely known as the father of modern day trading — the man who put Wall Street on a computer screen and convinced an entire generation that speed could replace experience.

The markets felt alive then: flashing, addictive, 

unforgiving. People weren’t just trading stocks.

They were trading hope, fear, and ego.

When I sold my Pearl River building to Harvey, it felt strangely symbolic. Two people shaped by the same electric moment — a time when belief moved faster than reason, and everyone thought the ride would never end.

* * *

Harvey explained his trading revolution to me with complete conviction.

I didn’t have time for it. I was running a real business. I had payroll, printing deadlines, advertisers, and twenty-hour days. Day trading felt like noise.

Still, something pulled at me.

* * *

One afternoon, I went to my bank branch, requested a two-million-dollar cashier’s check, and drove straight to the Fidelity Investments office on Route 17.

I walked in, waited in line, and when it was my turn, I told the woman behind the counter that I wanted to open a trading account.

She said, “You need fifty dollars to open an account.”

I told her I had brought a bank check.

She entered my name, Social Security number, address, and phone number into her computer. Then I slid the check across the counter.

She stared at it.

Then she looked back at me and said,

“There are too many zeros on this check.”

Before I could respond, she pressed the panic button beneath the counter.

I stood there quietly, watching her expression shift from confusion to concern. A security guard appeared from the back office. Then another employee. No one spoke. They just watched.

Across the street sat the Mercedes dealership — the same place where, not long before, a salesman had looked past me as if I didn’t belong.

In that moment, something became clear.

In the era of irrational exuberance, money moved faster than trust — and credibility lagged far behind both.

Less than six months later, the dot-com bubble burst.

My two-million-dollar trading account vanished with it.

I carried those losses forward on my tax returns for nearly twenty years — a long, quiet reminder of a time when confidence outran caution, and even smart people confused momentum for permanence.

“I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

That line, delivered by Lloyd Bentsen during the 1988 vice-presidential debate, stayed with me for years — not because it was political, but because it captured a universal truth.

Experience cannot be imitated.

I knew artificial intelligence. I taught AI at CloudEXPO to engineers from Google, Facebook, and Twitter in 2013 — long before it became a headline, a stock symbol, or a gold rush.

And just like the dot-com era before it, I can feel it again.

The next bubble is forming.

And when it breaks, it may be far worse.