It REALLY depends on whether or not you believe that the SAME opportunity exists for you today that was able to be had in the mid nineties. If you DO... you must have Millions in cash to invest in domains.
Because friend... "Generics" are gone. Get used to it. The "blue chip" domain buys of the past ten years are history. LONG generics is all that is left.
If you buy into the hype that single or short generics are the only things that make money and the only things to spend money on... you are done before you begin.
If you can afford to get into that game today... odds are, you DON'T need the money anyway.
Type-in Traffic is dependant on these. Pure and simple. If you are to get into this biz today, you gotta think about alternatives... things like BRANDING and SEARCH TRAFFIC.
As domains are getting harder to find, so then are results for topical searches getting harder to zero in on.
My suggestion is to look into multiple word domains that have HIGH search value with LOW search result competition.
I have a domain that is NOT considered one of the conveted "generic" domains, and that most people would consider "too long" to have any value.
However... it is made up of three soild keywords that are searched together over 5000 times per day. It is in the Home Mortgage industry, which pays very well for clicks... up to $4 per click some days. The BEST thing is that despite the high number of daily searches, the results list is UNDER 20,000 hits and I am
#1 on the list at Google and Yahoo.
High yeild, low competition and good revenues... yet, repeatedly people here have valued the domain at "reg fee, maybe a bit more to an end user".
This is the "money for nuthin" industry where the theology is to buy a domain for reg fee, park it for FREE having done ZERO effort and earn 5 figures a month until you sell it for high 6 figures in a few months.
Maybe if you bought 10 - 15 years ago... not today, Pal. Any old schmuch could have made money buying back then. Today, you have to be SMARTER, be more creative and yes... WORK a little harder too.
If you can do these things... you stand a chance of making a buck or two.
Best of luck,
GoPC