The top dot-com stocks were making history in 1999 and 2000. Today’s Nasdaq winners are crushing even those gains.
The top 10 performers in the Nasdaq 100 (NDX) over the past year are up an average of 784%, according to BTIG’s Jonathan Krinsky, topping the 622% average gain for the index’s biggest winners in the year leading into its March 2000 peak.
There are many differences between the two eras. But this does show that the most explosive corner of the market has already moved into dot-com-scale territory — and the cast list makes the comparison feel a little eerie.
In the year before the Nasdaq’s March 2000 peak, the index’s top performers included Strategy (MSTR), Qualcomm (QCOM), Sandisk (SNDK), Analog Devices (ADI), Lam Research (LRCX), Regeneron (REGN), Nvidia (NVDA), Cognizant (CTSH), Apple (AAPL), and Adobe (ADBE).
Today’s leaderboard is different, but not exactly new.
Sandisk (SNDK) is now at the top, followed by Western Digital (WDC), Seagate (STX), Micron (MU), Intel (INTC), Lam Research, AMD (AMD), Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), Marvell Technology (MRVL), and Applied Materials (AMAT).
Some of the echoes are direct. Sandisk and Lam Research appear on both lists, linking the dot-com runup to today’s AI-infrastructure boom.
Others are more like historical rhymes. Nvidia, Apple, and Adobe were dot-com-era winners and remain major tech players today, even though they are not in the current top 10. Applied Materials also appeared separately among the Nasdaq 100’s top performers in 1999 and just missed the 2000-window table shown here.
Strategy may be the strangest rhyme of all. It topped the 2000-window list as MicroStrategy, then one of the Nasdaq’s hottest software stocks. Today, the Michael Saylor-led company is a very different kind of market vehicle, driven mostly by its massive bitcoin exposure.
The sore thumb in the modern list is Warner Bros. Discovery. The rest of the group mostly fits the AI-infrastructure trade. WBD is a media M&A story, with its rally fueled by a takeover fight between Netflix (NFLX) and Paramount Skydance (PSKY), which ultimately struck a deal for the company.
The old boom was built around the web, networking, chips, storage, and the promise of a new digital economy. The current boom is built around AI infrastructure, memory, data centers, storage, bitcoin, and the physical limits of compute.
That makes the rhyme more interesting than a simple bubble call. The speculative energy is familiar, but the bottlenecks have changed. Investors are chasing the pieces of the market that look scarce in the next build-out.













