SURPRISE. SURPRISE

The bond market continues to conjure up a plethora of opinions. Some say it's a bubble, some say it isn't, sort of like the old childhood ditty many of us remember: She-loves-me, she-loves-not

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I recall the tech bubble in 2002 not long before the gas came out of the balloon. At the Las Vegas Money Show thousands of visitors poured through the hundreds of exhibits daily, nearly all of them wearing tech blinders. Day trading was hotter than last year's sex symbol.

A 20-something-looking guy told me he just bought a new house and quit his camera man job at ESPN to day trade. It was easy, it was profitable and I could do it too. There was only one trend. Just keep buying the dips. Wall Street Week, a popular cable television show starring the late Louis Rukeyser, kept most of the techies well fed.

One of the most popular tech newsletter writers had SRO audiences every day while the few value oriented speakers might as well had Hanson's disease or a fresh case of the avian flu. One value guy I spoke with told me in two days he had three people show for his talk and two those were friends. 

Another value guy told me he got so lonely he considered joining the local chapter of the Lonely Hearts Club. The popularity of online dating lay in the future. More than half of the visitors were still conveniently on the summer side of life, a period noted for its distinct absence of anything that resembles disillusion or bubbles.

Though there had been some market sell-offs, the last sustained bear market until then happened in 1973-74 when many in the crowd were still most likely muttering she-loves-me, she-loves-me nots. The 73-74 sell-off did its best rendition Dorian Gray, taking awhile before it turned really lastingly ugly.

A friend told me just before the crash a big regional bank stock he was into split, with half of it going into the new spinoff. Shareholders had a choice, take cash, take a portion of shares in the new spinoff or stay fully with the parent company. He opted for half and half, saying it sounded like a good idea at the time, since the fledgling spinoff by all expert accounts was destined for greatness. He even added to his position.

The market crashed, the spinoff went belly-up and the parent company's shares languished for years. All of that by 2002, however, was just a distant memory or, worse yet, no memory at all.

Another value guy went around passing out business cards with a Harry Truman quote: "The only thing new today is the history you failed to learn yesterday."  It got a lot laughs, not much else.