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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

    Thought of the Day

    2000: The whole structure of stock-market quotations contains a built-in contradiction. The better a companys record and prospects, the less relationship the price of its shares will have to their book value. But the greater the premium above book value, the less certain the basis of determining its intrinsic value i.e., the more this value will depend on the changing moods and measurements of the stock market. Thus we reach the final paradox, that the more successful the company, the greater are likely to be the fluctuations in the price of its shares. This really means that, in a very real sense, the better the quality of a common stock, the more speculative it is likely to be.

    –Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor (New York: HarperBusiness, 2003), p. 198.
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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

1929: The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index (calculated retroactively) hits 31.86, its peak for the Roaring Twenties bull market. It does not close above that level until September 22, 1954. When you hear that stocks "always outperform in the long run," do you realize how long "long" can be?

David M. Blitzer, chief investment strategist, Standard & Poor's Corp.

1920: Slightly before 12 noon, a massive charge of dynamite goes off in a horse-drawn wagon parked in front of the Wall Street headquarters of J.P. Morgan & Co. Thirty people are killed immediately, another ten are mortally wounded, and hundreds are injured in a fierce hail of shrapnel and flying glass. "RED PLOT SEEN IN BLAST," declares The New York Times, but no "Bolshevik" involvement is ever proven and, to this day, the crime has never been solved. Several buildings along Wall Street are still scarred from the blast.

Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1997, reprint of 1931 ed.), pp. 52-53;John Brooks, Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920-1938 (Harper & Row, New York, 1969), pp. 1-11;The New York Times, September 17, 1920, pp. 1-5;Museum of American Financial History, New York.

1908: William Crapo Durant, the nation's leading maker of wooden wagons and buggies, incorporates the General Motors Co. Durant knows that if GM succeeds, it will put his current industry out of business-and he goes ahead anyway. GM will serve as a holding company for the stock of Durant's Buick Motor Co., the biggest "motorcar" producer in the country–and will ultimately encompass dozens of other automakers and related companies.

Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., My Years with General Motors (eds. John McDonald and Catharine Stevens, Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1964), pp. 4-5.

1777: Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the world's greatest merchant banker, is born in a decrepit, eight-foot-wide house in the Judengasse ghetto of Frankfurt, Germany, to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a mail-order antique dealer, and Gutle Schnapper Rothschild.

Victor Gray and Melanie Aspey, eds., The Life and Times of N.M. Rothschild, 1777-1836 (N.M. Rothschild & Sons, London, 1998), p. 9;Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets, 1798-1848 (Viking, New York, 1998), pp. 38, 44.