• Summon Your Courage and Buy Stocks

    Investors who conquer stock-phobia have an edge over those too focused on their rearview mirror By Jason Zweig 2025: Oct. 4, 2008 12:01 am ET During the Great…

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  • Thought of the Day

    Thought of the Day

    2000: [Sir John] Templetons sometime partner, Vance, then an elderly man, used to enjoy lecturing about investments. Part of his kit was a huge chart plotted on a roll of wrapping paper… This chart plotted the market for the previous twenty years. Then there were different squiggly lines representing the various factors that influence itindustrial production, money supply, and so on. One squiggly line was best of all. It worked perfectly. Year after year if you had followed it you could have known where the market was headed and made a killing. When the audience, fascinated, demanded to know what it represented, Mr. Vance told them. It was the rate his chickens were laying, in the chicken coop behind his house.

    –John Train, The Money Masters (Harper & Row, 1980), p. 177.
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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

1999: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 11,000 for the first time, just 24 trading days after breaking the 10,000 mark — the shortest interval on record between 1,000-point milestones. The index ends the day at 11014.69.

1998: The front page of the Sunday New York Times reports that an obscure biotechnology company, Entremed Inc., has cured cancer in mice. In the article, Nobel laureate James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA, says that Entremed's head researcher "is going to cure cancer in two years." On Monday morning, Entremed's stock skyrockets from $12.06 per share to $85. By the end of the week, after later reports pooh-poohing Entremed's research, the stock has sagged to $33.25 — leaving latecomers holding the bag.

The New York Times, May 3, 1998, p. A1;Nature, May 14, 1998, pp. 104-105;Science, May 15, 1998, pp 996-997;Gur Huberman and Tomer Regev, "Contagious Speculation and a Cure for Cancer: a Nonevent that Made Stock Prices Soar," The Journal of Finance, vol. LVI, no. 1 (February, 2001), pp. 387-396