What is the best tool for testing things like this (are there big datasets available for public stock markets?)
From everything I've seen, beta for tech stocks has been positive for basically all of the past 40 years, and S&P has been up by a lot, so yes, tech stocks did well. That doesn't really say it did better than other sectors individually, but better than average.
Trains also had huge amounts of skull duggery going on, at a time where pump and dump scams involved people physically forging fake shares and selling them on the market to destroy the price of said stock.
Plus railways are cap intensive as well - tech investment comparatively is far lower, with a greater pay off.
If you think there is no monkey business in tech... well, I've got a bridge you can invest in:-)
I think that tech is certainly a growth sector, but does that translate into buying into stocks in the whole sector and coming out ahead? There is some pretty vicious competition, no? DEC, SGI, Yahoo, Altavista, Wang Laboratories, Commodore International... the list of companies that once flew high and then tanked is fairly long.
How does back-testing tech as a sector work out over the past 40 years or so?