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    2026: People are always asking me what I’m reading. Because I think and talk and read about investing all day long, I typically don’t read financial…

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    Thought of the Day

    2000: In large part, companies obtain the shareholder constituency that they seek and deserve. If they focus their thinking and communications on short-term results or short-term stock market consequences they will, in large part, attract shareholders who focus on the same factors. And if they are cynical in their treatment of investors, eventually that cynicism is highly likely to be returned by the investment community.

    –Warren Buffett, chairmans letter, Berkshire Hathaway annual report, 1979,
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Jason is the author of “Your Money and Your Brain,” on the neuroscience of investing, and the editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor,” the classic text that Warren Buffett has described as “by far the best book about investing ever written.”

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Today in Financial History

1936: The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) is incorporated to oversee the conduct of brokerage firms. (Over the years, critics will point out that the NASD's variable degrees of toughness toward its own members are a good reminder of the two main meanings of the word "oversight.")

Sources Museum of American Financial History.

1932: How bad can it get? In the depths of the Depression, Wall Street takes its own pulse and detects only faint signs of life. In the bond market, 19.4% of all debt issued by foreign governments and corporations has defaulted, along with 14% of real-estate debt, 7.2% of all U.S. industrial bonds, 5.4% of utility debt, 3.5% of railroad issues, and 1.8% of all municipal bonds. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is at 73.67, down from 381.17 just three years earlier-an 80.7% loss.

Barrie A. Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of Securities Markets in the United States, 1929-1933 (Greenwood Press, Westport, Ct., 1985), p. 400;Phyllis S. Pierce, ed., The Dow Jones Averages 1885-1980 (DowJones Irwin, Homewood, IL, 1982), not paginated

1929: The total market capitalization of all the stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange reaches $82.11 billion. (The value of all securities, including U.S. and foreign stocks and government bonds, peaked that day at $136,409,448,062.) The biggest sector by far is the utilities industry, with $14.79 billion in market value, followed by railroads, petroleum, chemicals, and automobiles. By July 1, 1932, the market value of all listed stocks will shrivel to $12.70 billion, an 84.5% loss.

Barrie A. Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of Securities Markets in the United States, 1929-1933 (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1985), pp. 640-643;New York Stock Exchange Report of the President, May 1, 1930-May 1, 1931 (New York Stock Exchange, 1931), p. 35.

1862: The San Francisco Stock and Exchange Board is founded by 37 brokers to organize trading in silver and gold mining stocks — primarily based at the booming Comstock Lode in Virginia City, Nev.

Eliot Lord, Comstock Mining and Miners (Howell-North Books, San Diego, CA, 1980 [reprint of original 1883 edition]), p. 131.