Foolish Special
[ Friday, December 17, 1999]
A Foolish Year -- The Motley Fool looks back at 1999
By Stuart Watson (TMFTiger)
Introduction
With Christmas around the corner it is time for the obligatory year end reviews. And what a year it has been. We have seen soaring stock markets, Y2K worries grow and then subside, mobile mania and last but by no means least, the coming of age of the Internet in the UK. When will this bull market come to an end? We seem to have been asking that question for a number of years. Well, 1999 was definitely not the year it ground to a halt. Let's have a look at the growth in some of the main stock market indices.
FTSE 100 +13.9%
FTSE A/S +17.4%
FTSE 250 +29.9%
FTSE Small Cap +43.9%
Dow Jones +22.5%
NASDAQ +69.4%
So it has been yet another year where the UK market has returned more than its 80 year long-term average of 12.2%. But I think it is safe to say that the NASDAQ wins the hindsight prize for the best performing major market of 1999. Where will the markets be at the end of 2000? Well, your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps a more pertinent question is where will the markets be in 2020 -- or even 2030 and beyond. We're happy to leave the short-term guessing game to the rest of the financial press.
The Motley Fool itself has changed dramatically in 1999. We have taken on more and more staff. We moved into an office for the first time, outgrew that in a few months, and moved into a bigger one. At the start of the year we were getting around 100 message board posts a day. At the moment the daily total is over 1,000. In July we celebrated our 50,000th post after the Fool had been running for around 16 months. Now we have well over 130,000 posts. That's a lot of Foolishness.
Five Foolish writers have collected their thoughts on the year. TMFEagle starts off by looking at some of the winners from the FTSE350 index, and in particular Eidos (LSE: EID) and Psion (LSE: PON). Where are there winners, there must be also be losers. TMFMayn takes a look at three companies who would rather forget all about 1999. You won't be surprised to hear that one of them is a retailer. Hopefully you have been following TMFEssex's weekly series on Sectors. To close the year he presents the big screen version and finds some surprises amongst both the best and worst performing industries.
As we said above, 1999 was the year the Internet came of age. TMFNigel looks back at the year on the web, where we saw numerous flotations and the rise of both Internet sharedealing and retailing. Finally, I take a peek at another group of companies that proved to be a good home for your money in 1999, technology licensing companies.
The Year In Review
Introduction
1. TMFEagle looks at the gold medallists of 1999.
2. TMFMayn visits the kennel: who were the dogs of the past year?
3. TMFEssex ruminates on a sector by sector basis.
4. TMFNigel thumbs through the year on the World Wide Web.
5. TMFTiger reviews the rise of intellectual property companies.
