The bubble has finally burst and is taking no prisoners. Most of these dot-com's will trade at pennies and many will go out of business. Just look at the stock chart of any dot-com issue on the market. It's very hard to find one that is not trading at or near a 52 week low. Reason number two is a little more complex.
Consumer confidence is extremely down.
People do not have a reason to get excited right now. We need positive announcements among the blue chip stocks that have been beat up this past year. Companies continue to disappoint the street with bad earnings, in turn forcing companies to cut costs by laying off workers as we have been seeing daily, even by Wall Street's most respected companies. For example, just this year alone, Motorola has laid off a total of 22,000 employees. When all this happens, analysts downgrade stocks and lower earnings estimates, therefore losing investor confidence and taking the demand out of stocks.