The Globe and Mail reports in its Wednesday edition that Scott Barlow's formative investing experiences in the late 1990s kept him well away from the boom in cannabis stocks. The Globe reporter says that the pre-2000 tech bubble was characterized by investors paying huge stock prices for companies with no earnings. They were confident that the technological transformation of the global economy would eventually send the stock much higher. Investors in 1999 were not wrong about the eventual dominance of technology in our daily lives, and cannabis investors are wrong about the eventual mammoth scale of the marijuana market. The correct price to pay for market participation in the trend is at issue, then and now. There is a decent chance that cannabis stocks will continue to rise and not endure a painful 2000-style meltdown. Either way, the situation is a good example of how the precedent investors use to understand current markets is extremely important to future returns. Forty years ago, the now-legendary hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller was then a 25-year-old analyst. Yet he was promoted to the head of research at Pittsburgh National Bank because the bank understood the importance of a new perspective.