The meteoric rise of stock prices in the late 1990s is now widely considered to be the result of irrational exuberance among investors, but the current stock market rally is nothing like that, MarketWatch reports.

Then, price to earnings ratios on the S&P 500 expanded to absurd levels as investors piled into technology stocks believing that the internet would change the world, only to see more than half of their portfolio to be wiped out during the subsequent crash.