First Take: Back to the future — Nasdaq 5000 circa 2015

The once-deflated Nasdaq has fully reflated.

For the past 15 years, chatter about Nasdaq 5000 was mainly in the past tense, a historical remnant of the dot-com stock bubble era. But today, for the first time since March 2000, the Nasdaq composite — powered by Apple, the world's most valuable company and maker of the iPhone, and a fresh wave of innovation in social media, digital technology and biotech — is back above 5000 and very much alive in the current events debate.

Way back when, on March 9, 2000, when the Internet was in diapers and investors were betting that the World Wide Web would be a moneymaking investment of epic proportions, the Nasdaq and its army of newly minted dot-com stocks skyrocketed to its first close above 5000, up an eye-popping 111% from a year earlier. At the time, "Nasdaq 5000" elicited a 1969 "man on the moon"-type awe from investors ranging from Wall Street titans to taxi drivers and hairdressers who viewed "Net stocks" as their ticket to gain entrance to the esteemed Millionaire's Club.

But as the history books show, life wasn't sustainable for the Nasdaq at those rarefied levels. The index closed above 5000 just two days. The rocket ship known as the Nasdaq – a tech-dominated index loaded with untested Internet companies valued by clicks rather than profits and trading at more than 100 times projected earnings that never materialized – ran out of fuel. Once irrationally exuberant investors stopped buying and sold and sold and sold, the index hit bottom in October 2002, nearly 80% below its peak of 5048.62 on March 10, 2000.

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