• 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: The investor can scarcely take seriously the innumerable predictions which appear almost daily and are his for the asking. Yet in many cases he pays attention to them and even acts upon them. Why? Because he has been persuaded that it is important for him to form some opinion of the future course of the stock market. If you, the reader, expect to get rich over the years by following some system or leadership in market forecasting, you must be expecting to try to do what countless others are aiming at, and to be able to do it better than your numerous competitors in the market. There is no basis either in logic or in experience for assuming that any typical or average investor can anticipate market movements more successfully than the general public, of which he himself is a part.

    –Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor (New York: HarperBusiness, 2003), p. 189.
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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: Priceline.com, which had gone public at $16 a share exactly one month earlier, closes the day at $162.375 — giving the tiny Internet company a one-month return of 914.8% and a total market value of $23 billion. It's probably the fastest and stupidest stock run-up yet recorded. But it's all downhill from here, as Priceline.com ends up losing 99% of its value by the end of 2000.

The New York Times, October 6, 2000, p. C1

1901: Total daily trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange exceeds 3 million for the first time, as 3,075,089 shares change hands — just one day after volume broke the 2-million mark for the first time.

1803: President Thomas Jefferson signs the Louisiana Purchase, paying Napoleon Bonaparte $15 million for 828,000 square miles of territory, which stretches from the Mississippi River to the Rockies and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border. In the stroke of a pen, the United States nearly doubles in size, and a huge frontier of opportunity opens for its citizens. The U.S. finances the deal by borrowing $11.25 million in 6% bonds from European investors.