Cisco hit an all-time high over the weekend.
That’s not a headline from December 15, 2000… but an actual print from this morning.
Cisco, the manufacturer of modems and routers, was the darling of the dot-com era. After 25 years in the woodshed, Cisco has regained some headline status:
Dotcom-era darling Cisco is making new all-time highs, a quarter-century later. Good on them for staying in business. (Source: Morning Brew)
The Cisco-to-Nvidia comparison has been so thoroughly analyzed in the financial press that most people move on without paying attention at all. Another lazy dot-com analogy, they shrug, and scroll on.
That’s a mistake.
Here’s the detail that still ought to make you sit up a little straighter.
At the absolute peak of the dot-com boom — routers stacked to the ceiling and PowerPoint masquerading as profits — Cisco’s market capitalization topped out at roughly 4.4% of U.S. GDP.
Nvidia today? Roughly 16% of U.S. GDP.
That’s not a rounding error.
Measured against the size of the economy, Nvidia is in a category Cisco never visited. Which means that any serious disappointment in the AI build-out would scale 2000–01 – geometrically.
Back then, the tech bust was painful but containable. Today, with a single company representing that much economic weight, a similar air pocket would ripple far beyond stock charts — into capital spending, credit markets, pensions, and politics.
Add in the market share of Alphabet, Meta, Amazon… you’re starting to talk about real money. And real world impact, beyond the indexes into everyday American homes.
The technology may well change the world. No doubt in our view that it will.
The lesson here is that markets have a logic all their own, distinct from the innovation cycle. And when valuation runs that far ahead of gravity, the reckoning comes quickly and lasts a long time.
~ Addison
P.S. Last week, we caught up with a good friend, Dan Amoss, who, as a forensic accountant, was way ahead of the tech bust and even more accurately the collapse in mortgage-backed securities in 2008. One trade he laid on – a short on the Lehman Bros – shot up 470% overnight on September 15, 2008. But that’s just one in a career of notable wins.
To the layman, Dan’s methods are similar to those of Michael Burry, of “The Big Short” fame, except that Dan had developed his own methods long before the financial world even knew Burry’s name or small details like “Burry’s a doctor with one glass eye.”
Over lunch, Mr. Amoss delved into the details of some of the trades he had made during the AI boom and the forensic reasons he believes 2026 will be even more challenging for individual investors than either 2000-01 or 2008-09. It was a lot. But clear and coherent.
I invited him to join us for Grey Swan Live! this Thursday, December 18, 2025 @2pm EST. He agreed. More details will be shared as we finalize arrangements for him to present his findings. Stay tuned…
If you have requests for new guests you’d like to see join us for Grey Swan Live!, or have any questions for our guests, send them here.
