So LinkedIn.com is coming public and hol…

So  LinkedIn.com is coming public and holy cow is the mainstream  media  hyping the heck out of it.  Every major news outlet is  breathlessly  explaining how the IPO was originally priced in the low  $30s last week,  then upped to the mid $40s earlier this week and how it  priced at the  highest end of that range last night.  And now it’s  opening up trading  at $80 plus per share today.   And every single  article, new commentator  and/or pundit immediately then starts debating  whether this frenzied  example of the barrage of IPOs hitting the  market is indicative of a new  bubble.

Since DJIA 8k or so, a couple years ago, I’ve been  predicting that  we were finally about to enter what I have long called  an “echo tech-o  bubble”.  The idea was that as a result of the Fed’s  easy money  policies, fiscal spending binges in the name of stimuli, and a  new tech  spending boom fueled by apps, smartphones, tablets and clouds,  would  all combine to push us into a new tech stock market bubble.

The  DJIA is up some 50% since I’ve started investing my time, money  and  reputation on this coming echo tech-o bubble, and many of the  stocks  I’ve been highlighting as the best plays on this revolution are  up  double and triple over the same time period.

Last year, I often  wrote that 2010 was probably setting us up a lot  like 1997 or 1998 did,  when the tech IPO boom really started kicking in  and the Fed’s free  money policies out of fear of a downturn and then a  potential Y2K  disaster funneled huge money into companies coffers.    When all those  early IPOs started popping and making investors think  they were gonna be  rich beyond their wildest dreams, (think LinkedIn  today and RenRen last  week) and all that money that all those companies  raised started being  thrown around on new technologies, new servers,  new software, new  websites, new apps…well, we did eventually enter a  bubble.

It  was four years after and 300% move later in the Nasdaq from the  time  idiots like Alan Greenspan (think of the pundits warning you of a  new  tech bubble already existing right now) were warning people in 1996  that  stocks had entered a period of “irrational exuberance”.  Of  course by  the top of the bubble, Alan had reversed himself and argued  that there  was no tech stock market bubble.

A few weeks ago when Chinese  social network site RenRen had its IPO,  I wrote an article about how I  wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole,  but that there were some great  investment opportunities arising from  such IPOs anyway.  And it’s the  same dynamic today with LinkedIn.com,  which while I’m not going to chase  at $80 a share the day it comes  public, is a great company and in  coming years will probably grow into  this $8 billion valuation the  market is now giving it.

But the best way, the only way, to  really profit on the scores of  companies coming public this summer is to  buy the companies that sells  them the technological picks and shovels  of the 21st century.  That  means sticking with stocks like Adtran and  Riverbed.

As I wrote yesterday about those two stocks:

I first started flagging Adtran for subscribers back  when it was  almost exactly half of the price it is right now.  The stock  has come  down from $47 a couple months ago and has been trading in the  very high  $30s to the low $40s since.  The company is scrambling to meet  demand  from carriers who are scrambling to meet demand from wireless  customers  who demand much more bandwidth than they can currently get.

Adtran’s  been trading a bit like a lesser volatile version of  Riverbed, which I  first started flagging for readers when it was 1/3  today’s price and  which is also scrambling to meet demand from  customers who are  scrambling tom meet demand from enterprise customers  who demand much  more bandwidth than they can currently get in their  private networks.