Today: Silicon Valley tech stocks continued to rise toward new heights in 2014, but concerns about another bubble seem unfounded.

The Lead: Technology stocks continue to grow, but bubble talk won’t go away

Silicon Valley stocks continued to move up the mountain toward their dot-com-era levels in 2014, again creating concern that another tech bubble is forming, but experts believe those worries are ignoring the changes that have taken place since the 2000 crash.

While the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached record highs in 2014 and ended the year Wednesday with growth of 7.5 percent and 11.4 percent respectively, the tech-heavy Nasdaq grew faster at 13.4 percent but is still lower than its peak levels reached in 2000. The SV150 trailed the Nasdaq’s growth but topped the two broad-based indexes, adding 11.9 percent to end the year at 1,670.41, falling below the 1,700 mark with declines in the final two sessions of the year.

With the rise in stock prices came more concern and predictions of another bubble bursting, but thoughts of a sudden, sharp decline in Silicon Valley tech companies across the board is generally laughed off.

“It’s sort of hilarious that we’re talking about bubbles again when the Nasdaq still hasn’t gotten back to 5,000 and its been almost 15 years,” Santa Clara University finance professor Robert Hendershott said.

“From a valuation point, we’re not in the previous bubble territory,” ClearPath Capital Markets Chief Investment Officer Brendan Connaughton said, noting much stronger price-to-earnings ratios for tech companies and the increased scrutiny on initial public offerings as compared to the dot-com boom.

“In 2000, there was an IPO on the back of a napkin, you get some backers, you filed, and the next thing you know, you don’t have a dollar worth of revenue, or even the possibility of revenue, and you’re trading at $200,” he proffered.

Connaughton’s colleague, ClearPath Managing Partner Paul Boyd, compared the current bull market to the growth on Wall Street from 1981 to 1999, when there were several corrections, including the 1987 stock market crash. He noted that today’s market is also experiencing corrections, including a drop of almost 10 percent in October of 2014.

“We’re probably in the middle of a very long, secular bull market that may last many more years, and along the way we’ll have all these corrective events, which may mean even a big pullback,” Boyd predicted.

The biggest difference between the dot-com era and today is the variance between the performances of specific Silicon Valley companies.

“There is a lot more refined view of technology that should have been there in the late 90s,” SCU’s Hendershott noted.

During the bubble, all tech stocks seemed to rise in unison, but now certain sectors or companies are struggling for the type of Wall Street excitement exhibited by Apple, Tesla and social-media stocks. Performances in 2014 were variable: Google declined nearly 5 percent as it exercised a stock split, while previously derided Electronic Arts more than doubled with a new leader at the helm, one of the strongest annual performances in the S&P 500.

“There’s more selectivity than the entire space being moved up, and that’s a dramatically different thing than we saw in 2000” Connaughton observed. “In a healthy market, you have winners and you have losers.”

In general, experts predict continued but slowing growth for Wall Street in 2015, just as 2014’s increase was slower than the gains of more than 30 percent for the main indexes in 2013. Stock market strategists polled by The Associated Press predicted the S&P 500 will increase about 6 percent to 8 percent next year.

The potential for bigger growth exists in possible investors on the sideline, who could juice stock prices if they change their mind about what Boyd called “the most hated bull market I’ve ever seen.”

“The old parable is ‘A bull market climbs a wall of worry.’ This bull market has clearly been climbing a wall of worry because people are not bought in,” Boyd noted.

SV150 market report

Up: AMD, Pandora, Yelp, SunPower, Tesla

Down: GoPro, Zynga, eBay, Cisco, Apple, SanDisk, Workday, Nvidia, Juniper, Facebook, HP, Symantec, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Applied Materials, Gilead

The SV150 index of Silicon Valley’s largest tech companies: Down 21.72, or 1.28 percent, to 1,670.41

The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Down 41.39, or 0.87 percent, to 4,736.05

The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Down 160, or 0.89 percent, to 17,823.07

And the widely watched Standard & Poor’s 500 index: Down 21.45, or 1.03 percent, to 2,058.9

This is the fifth in a series of BizBreaks looking at Silicon Valley financial trends in 2014. Sign up for the 60-Second Business Break newsletter at www.siliconvalley.com. Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/jowens510.