I agree with that. My point was that the vast number of "dot-com companies" these people were pouring money into in the late 90's never even claimed to make a dime's profit funny accounting or not.
And I agree with your point about the non-profit status of these dot coms. To my way of thinking it was basicly a scam to even allow them to sell stock. Aren't there some requirements on new issues? Don't there have to be tangible assets or at least a profit model? Most of those dot coms were never designed to make money that I can see. Seems like the SEC should have denied those stock offerings. People would have been far ahead of the game if they had.
I agree that people should know better than to jump in the market. Heck if we'd have all listened to our inner voices nobody would have made a dime in the late 1990s. As it is, fortunes were made. People were bankrupted too.
From 1995 or so on, I kept my money on the sidelines. I could have made a lot of money, but the P/E ratios told me that the bubble would burst sooner or later. My TSAs remained in tact until the market landed around 2100 on the NASDAQ. At that point I thought things had settled out. Boy was I wrong. Oh well.