Tech-Free Friday: Value, Same as It Ever Was

Ah, it's hard to even remember those heady days when the Nasdaq first tripped across the 4000 mark.

It was late December 1999, and everybody had pretty much figured out that the turning of the millennium would not be the end of world, tech stocks were king and buying anything with a price-to-earnings ratio below 50 seemed a surefire way to lose money.

We talked to a couple of value managers, the kind of guys who would get berated whenever they showed up on CNBC for keeping the faith and, as a result, missing out on the party. They did their doom-and-gloom thing, talked about how tech stocks were in a bubble and how it reminded them of oil stocks in the early '80s and so on. It all made a lot of sense -- we'd been running a series of stories under in a package called Mad Dash to Nasdaq that suggested that the market may have gotten a little, uh, euphoric -- but at the same time one wondered how the tide could ever turn. People talked a lot about how Joe Kennedy sold everything when his shoeshine boy gave him a stock tip, but we'd been having cabbies tell us about all the money they were making in the market for over a year and yet the Nasdaq had shown little respite. ...