Reddit traders, you may want to read this. In October 1999, five months before the internet bubble burst, @bloombergopinion‘s Joe Nocera wrote a cover story for Fortune magazine titled “Trader Nation.” It was about how middle-class Americans were embracing the stock market, with some even quitting their jobs to become day traders. Now 22 years later, he caught up with some of the people he interviewed then to glean some lessons about how living through a stock bubble can affect investors for the rest of their lives.
Take Ramesh Gulati (pictured). He was a 29-year-old financial advisor at the time. When the bubble burst, he recalled, “people were shell-shocked. A lot of people either sold their stocks or went into hibernation.” That memory has never left him.