The Dot-Com Bubble vs. Today
It took just one word to send a beverage company's stock on a 183% rally...
In late 2017, Long Island Iced Tea was in trouble.
Ambitious executives had wrestled the small company onto the Nasdaq Capital Market a year earlier, where it traded under the ticker LTEA. But it couldn't maintain the Nasdaq's minimum $35 million market cap. The company was going to be delisted.
Long Island Iced Tea was only selling about $5 million worth of tea and lemonade per year. That didn't impress investors. They didn't see the company being worth $35 million.
So management tried something new.
Their company wouldn't be about iced tea. It would be about cryptos... And it wouldn't be called Long Island Iced Tea. It would be called Long Blockchain.
As management put it, the company was "shifting its primary corporate focus towards the exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology." The tea business would become a subsidiary.
The renamed company reserved the web domain "longblockchain.com." It asked for a ticker change to LBCC. It made plans to buy some equipment to mine bitcoin.
If that sounds like a bunch of hooey, it was. But if you thought investors would see right through it, they did not.
In 2017, bitcoin was all anyone could talk about. By December, it had shot up nearly 2,000% since the beginning of the year. Folks were calling me right and left, asking whether they should take out loans to buy more of the crypto.
Long Blockchain hit the markets at just the right time. The word "blockchain" was enough to nearly triple the company's value in a matter of days.
This success didn't last, of course.
The company had absolutely no ties to blockchain and no experience with it. It had no crypto-related business plan. It never even managed to mine any bitcoin.
Before long, Nasdaq booted Long Blockchain off its exchange. And the company's leading shareholder got charged with insider trading for tipping off a friend about the company's coming crypto "pivot."
This price chart shows the company's rapid rise and fall...
You see a lot of stupid stuff during a speculative mania. People try to make a quick buck and ignore all reason.
You can see it with Long Blockchain during the 2017 bitcoin frenzy. And you can find countless examples from the dot-com bubble, when folks flocked to would-be Internet companies with no connection to the Internet... no products... and no revenues.
Today, instead of cryptos or the Internet, it's AI that has everyone excited.
AI dominates the news cycle, and everyone is trying to invest in companies that will benefit from it. Many AI stocks have posted monster returns.
Because of this, some folks are throwing around terms like "AI bubble" and "AI mania."
It's true that things are starting to feel a bit frothy...
But I, at least, haven't seen anything like what happened with Long Island Iced Tea...
Beverage companies aren't rebranding to names with "AI."
The stock market isn't flooded with no-revenue companies going public at absurd prices.
And I'm not getting inundated with calls from folks asking about the next great AI stock.
Now, longtime readers know me as a conservative investor. You know I prefer safe dividend payments to richly valued companies that might grow revenues by hundreds of percent a year.
That's still true. I'm never going to invest in the hottest AI stocks... You won't see me touch Nvidia (NVDA) at its current valuation... or recommend the recently public CoreWeave (CRWV), an AI cloud-computing platform.
The difference is, unlike Long Blockchain, these are real companies.
Also, many of the largest tech companies embracing AI today have real profits.
The chart below shows the 12-month cumulative net income and free cash flow for some of the biggest tech leaders...
Yes, we're in the midst of an AI boom, but that doesn't mean we're at the peak of a bubble. What we're seeing today doesn't match what I saw at the height of the dot-com craze or the 2017 bitcoin mania.
That means there's still time to make money.
One way to do that is with the help of my friend and colleague Gabe Marshank. A Wall Street veteran of more than two decades, Gabe is wading through smaller speculative stocks (including names in AI) to find the ones that could break out over the next three to five years.
If you want the chance to earn multiple times your money on under-the-radar AI plays while the sun is still shining on this market, I suggest you check out Gabe's recent presentation.
It won't be live for much longer, so don't delay. Click here for all the details.
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Here's to our health, wealth, and a great retirement,
Dr. David Eifrig and the Health & Wealth Bulletin Research Team
November 5, 2025