What History Teaches Us About Surviving A Stock Market Crash
Definition: A stock market crash is when stock indexes lose more than 10{bf6128eaee7daf804a40e739f155a69f2d5a72ca2bacccc9954495bcd60bdcac} in a day or two. However, even in 1937, the best year for the economy during the 1930s, an index of total stock prices, using 1929 = 100 as its base, had only reached 59. A disaggregation of this index shows that the figure for railroad stock was 34 while public utilities stock, which had played such a vigorous role in the boom of the 1920s, had reached 44. The performance of industrial stock was relatively good but, at 69, was still a long way below the level achieved in 1929.
In an analysis published in 2009, Tom Therramus pointed out that Black Monday fell into a broader pattern in which nearly every stock market crash and recession of the preceding 50 years had occurred shortly after a large and abrupt change in …