Case Study: The Dot Com Bubble and Its Lessons for Retail Investors

A plain-language case study of the dot com bubble, told from an Indian investor's seat. The course starts with the genuine internet revolution of the late 1990s and shows how it turned into a speculative frenzy, with new-era valuation metrics replacing earnings. It follows the Nasdaq's run to its March 2000 peak and the 78 percent crash that followed, and compares the few companies that survived with the many that vanished. It then turns to India's own tech bubble: the Infosys and Wipro rally, the K-10 stocks of the Ketan Parekh era, infotech mutual funds, and the 2001 unwinding that ended in a payment crisis, the UTI US-64 freeze and major SEBI reforms. It closes with practical lessons on spotting bubble signals, from 2000 to the new-age IPOs of 2021, and a playbook for staying disciplined when a theme gets hot.