Where Are the Bubble Blowhards on CME?

This column was originally published on RealMoney on March 2 at 12:26 p.m. EST. It's being republished as a bonus for TheStreet.com readers.

The bull market in exchanges seems to be in gear no matter what. I know people who are short CBOT Holdings(BOT Quote) and Chicago Mercantile Holdings(CME Quote) and they have pretty much run out of reasons to send me about why they should go lower. The momentum has just swept them up.

And you know what I find so amusing? Despite the unbelievable run in CME, nobody even doubts the valuation. You hear incredible chatter, particularly in the news media about how Google(GOOG Quote) at $300 is a "return" to the dot-com days of 1999. Someone mentions that peg at least once a day.

But how about CME? Here's a stock that is valued at the exact same forward multiple as Google but is growing at about half the pace. Why doesn't someone comment on how wrong that might be? Plus, at $438, it has that same kind of dot-com feel, a stock that goes to the moon just like so many of the 1999 vintages.

Of course, GOOG isn't at all like the crummy stuff that traded in the $300s and $400s in 1999. This company has strong earnings, stronger than CME. But the legacy of the dot-com crash is still very much with the hairsuit media. The media still feel incredibly guilty for the cheerleading during that period, even the ones who weren't cheerleaders.

One of the reason I received so much attention for my GOOG calls at CNBC was that I was obviously and allegedly courting dot-com disaster. But as I have always pointed out, the reason why the dot-coms could trade as high as they did -- other than the limited float -- is that the governing metrics weren't earnings and sales, but eyeballs and page views and a sense that some companies were going to be the next big things. Of course, it turned out that Yahoo!(YHOO Quote) was the only real one, but so be it.

So, I am demanding equal time for the farcical with CME, a stock and a company I like very much, but one that is far more out of control than Google is ... and nobody cares!

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