NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- When MarketWatch launched 10 years ago, the hottest stocks hailed from the budding Internet economy, as Wall Street scurried to capitalize on the legendary initial public offering from Netscape, the granddaddy of all dot-com deals.
Launched in 1995, Netscape's became the first IPO from the Internet sector to double in value during its first day of trading.
Although the company had yet to book any significant profit, it offered investors access to a new mass medium: the Web.
MarketWatch: 10 years online
Priced at $28 a share for their debut session on Aug. 8, 1995, shares of Netscape shot as high as $75 and ended that first day at $58.25.
Not long after, the 100% one-day gain became routine in the IPO market, as investors fell in love with a rosy vision of the nascent Internet age -- of a New Economy, even -- while overlooking the risks of betting on firms with little or no net income and only the briefest of track records.
The Net group's so-called story stocks rewrote the record book for the new-issues market. Eighteen of the U.S. IPO market's 20 biggest first-day gainers of all time took place between 1998 and 2000.
VA Linux Systems -- a firm operating in the hot area of Internet infrastructure and a potential competitor to another formerly hot stock, Microsoft
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, , ) -- still
wears the crown as the hottest IPO of all time with its mind-numbing 627% jump on Dec. 9, 1999. Priced for the IPO market at $30, shares stood at $239.25 after the first day of trades -- a one-day gain of more than $200 a share for the bankers and others lucky enough to have scored allocations before the stock opened on the Nasdaq.
At the time, investors shrugged off the fact that the company hadn't earned a penny.
Although VA Linux was expected to lose money for years, its valuation of 76 times its yearly revenue seemed "appropriate" relative to its peers, one analyst noted in the happy talk that characterized the era.
VA Linux's first day eclipsed the Nov. 12, 1998, debut by TheGlobe.com, a community site that had held the No. 1 slot with a 606% IPO pop. TheGlobe still ranks a close No. 2 on the all-time list, nearly a decade later.
Even MarketWatch holds a place in the IPO pantheon as the No. 7 opener of all time with a 474% jump over its $17 price in its first day of trading on Jan. 15, 1999.
At the time of the MarketWatch offering, Wall Street put aside jitters tied to stock-market sell-offs in Asia and Russia and dove into MarketWatch as the first major Internet deal of 1999, having no difficulty recalling TheGlobe.com's Day 1 experience.
With their newfound wealth, Internet firms made their mark beyond Wall Street as icons of a short-lived golden age that included lava lights, Gap khakis, logo-emblazoned fleece wear, in-office foosball tables and lucrative employee stock options.
Some of it was pretty whacky. Pets.com never really made much of a splash as a stock because its IPO came too late in the cycle, but its sock-puppet mascot served as a silly symbol of the excessive advertising spending of the newly rich dot-coms.
Netpliance.com, Webex.com and Autotrader touted their wares on the 2000 Super Bowl, the most expensive possible place to advertise.
By 2001, however, Pets.com shriveled as its stock sank 99%. Webvan at one point had a market cap of $4.8 billion, with plans to build 26 grocery-delivery megawarehouses. By the end of 2001, it had gone bust.
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, , ) , one of a handful of Internet holding companies to become day-trader darlings, saw its stock fade from triple digits to single.
MarketWatch was no exception. On Dec. 21, 2000, shares of the company closed below $2 a share, less than two years after it traded above $100 a share.
And good old Netscape was bought in March 1999 by another formerly white-hot star of the Net, America Online, for the price of $4.2 billion.
Not long after, AOL bought Time Warner
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, , ) in what's since been called the single worst deal in U.S. corporate history.
See full story. Survivors of a paradigm shift