The NASDAQ is now positive for the year.
That's a little surprising to me, but not a HUGE surprise.
Obviously in the dot com boom, my industry [tech] was the fuel for the boom and thus got hammered in the bust. But it was a bubble that was formed on a rising tide, and all the factors that created it were real and have only expanded since.
In the Great Recession, tech was largely unaffected. It was mostly a financial / blue collar impact that hit the mortgage industry (expanded into banking) and the construction industry. While it might have dampened the overall economy, it didn't directly impact or affect tech.
This is much the same. It's hammering retail/service industries hard, because those businesses have been forcibly shut down. Communications & Information Technology is largely considered an essential industry, and high tech is one of the industries that transitions easily to WFH. Construction is considered an essential industry, and while it's not easy to do WFH, they're still going to work building things.
The biggest potential hit to tech is if consumers can't buy things, either because the stores are closed or because they're on unemployment and don't want to spend if they don't have to. Mobile phones have been hammered during this for a combination of those two reasons. But tech in general is booming. Work from home and distance learning created an immediate new demand on tech infrastructure for those who are still working, and for kids. For those people and everyone else, the retreat inside our homes meant that most of our communication and entertainment is now electronic--social media and Netflix. So someone who might normally have gone and met friends for happy hour on a Tuesday night after work is now sitting at home on the couch watching streaming video. Huge boom there.
So while I wasn't sure whether the downturn in retail or the upturn in the rest of tech would be a net plus or net minus for tech, I knew it wasn't all negative news. I'm not at all surprised that the NASDAQ is up.