2000: It's another freaky Friday the 13th, as the Heartland Funds of Milwaukee adjust the pricing of two portfolios. Heartland High-Yield Municipal Bond loses 69.4% of its value, and Heartland Short Duration High-Yield Municipal drops by 44% — two of the biggest one-day declines in the 76-year history of mutual funds.

Morningstar Mutual Funds, November 6, 2000, p. S40;Pat Regnier and Adrienne Carter, "One Bad Day," Money, February, 2001, p.138.

1989: It's Friday the 13th, and Wall Street takes an unlucky pounding. The proposed leveraged buyout of United Airlines hits a snag when banks refuse to lend, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummets 154 points in an hour. It's the end of an era: The junk-bond binge of the 1980s dies a sudden and permanent death today. The Dow closes down 190.58 points, or 6.9%, at 2569.26, and a then-record 108 million shares trade hands in the last hour of trading.

The Wall Street Journal, October 16, 1989, pp. A1, C1

1971: Intel Corp. goes public on NASDAQ.

The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2000, p. C1

1915: Trading prices on the New York Stock Exchange, formerly quoted as a percentage of par value — just as bond prices still are today — are changed over to increments of dollars and fractions.

Fact Book for the Year 1997 (New York Stock Exchange, 1998), p. 91

1857: Eighteen banks in New York City suspend payments on loans after the Ohio Life Insurance & Trust Co., gambling on the midwestern land boom, goes bust. ÒThe telegraph was spreading half-truths and wild rumors over the whole country,Ó says chronicler James Medbery. ÒJournals, in the interest of men who prey upon panic, caught up every whisper, misstated and exaggerated lists of failures, and ran up their editions to thousands upon thousands…. shares went down, down, down.Ó Stock prices drop 8-10% in a day, setting off the terrible Panic of 1857.

Walter Werner and Steven Smith, Wall Street (Columbia University Press, New York, 1991), p. 136;James K. Medbery, Men and Mysteries of Wall Street (Fields, Osgood & Co., Boston, 1870;reprinted, Fraser Publishing Co., Wells, VT, 1968) pp. 316-317

1691: Sir Stephen Evance incorporates the Company for Making Hollow Sword Blades in the North of England, one of the earliest companies to issue tradable stock — and the predecessor of the South Sea Co., whose own shares cause a speculative fever that overheats and nearly destroys the British financial system in 1720.

John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (The Cresset Press, London, 1960), pp. 30-31.