The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday, Sept. 30, edition that many investors are quick to compare the current market with the late 1990s. The Globe's Scott Barlow writes that he was on a major trading floor back then. He says the current environment is much tamer. Stansberry Research analyst Alan Gula says while recent IPOs like Newsmax and Circle Internet saw significant first-day jumps, such volatility was common in 1999, which had 470 new stock issues and an average first-day return of 71 per cent. The most popular tech stocks now are cheap relative to the tech leaders of the late '90s. According to Goldman Sachs, the biggest company back then, Microsoft, was trading at 69 times forward earnings. Nvidia is the biggest now and it trades at 30 times forward estimates. Cisco Systems was the second biggest stock back in 1999 and it traded at 101 times forward earnings. Microsoft, now the second largest stock, is trading at 32 times forward earnings. In March, 2000, 62 of the largest 1,000 companies had PE ratios over 100. Currently, 29 do, including Tesla, Palantir Technologies, Snowflake and Cloudflare. Tesla is the only stock at truly absurd valuations -- 218 times next fiscal year's earnings.