Technology shares have been powering the stock market recently, outperforming the broader stock indexes by wide margins. The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100, for example, is up 19 percent over the last 12 months, almost twice as much as the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, which has risen 10 percent.
Investor enthusiasm for all things tech is understandable, given the disruptions the industry is bringing to so many businesses and the potential profits associated with that upheaval.
But there’s a more troubling aspect of the current exuberance for technology stocks: the degree to which so many of the popular companies with premium-priced shares promote financial results and measures that exclude their actual costs of doing business.
These companies, in effect, highlight performance that is based more on fantasy than on reality.Read more in the NYT.
