One difference between the stock market now and 25 years ago, is back then a hot tech company might IPO at a $1 billion valuation, and a stockholder could buy i

One difference between the stock market now and 25 years ago, is back then a hot tech company might IPO at a $1 billion valuation, and a stockholder could buy in and ride it up to $100 billion. Every $1 put into Cisco at its IPO in 1990 turned into $500 by 2000. In recent years, Facebook did not IPO until it had a market cap of $100 billion. Stripe was just valued at ~$95 billion and there is little news on the horizon about a forthcoming IPO. Even considering inflation, hot tech companies are IPO'ing at a much higher valuation than they did 25 years ago. So the old stock market where you could ride up hot tech stocks in the public market is not the modern market. This also affects the returns on investing in the NASDAQ index and other indexes.