• 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 human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at childrens games since the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, Keep tomorrow dark, and which is also named…Cheat the Prophet. The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.

    –G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (Wordsworth Classics, Ware, Hertfordshire, UK, 1996), p. 3.
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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

1998: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 9000 for the first time, just over one year after it broke through the 8000 barrier. The Dow finishes the day at 9033.23.

John A. Prestbo, ed., The Market's Measure: An Illustrated History of America Told through the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Dow Jones, New York, 1999), pp. 98, 101

1988: The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is overhauled. Instead of being made up of 400 industrial stocks, 40 utilities, 40 financial stocks and 20 transportation issues, its industry weights now float freely, so that stocks from all sectors are represented by market value.

S&P 500 2001 Directory (Standard & Poor's, New York, 2001), p. 10.

1965: A rocket takes off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, launching Intelsat I, or "Early Bird," into orbit. The world's first commercial communications satellite is up and floating — making the world a much smaller place, as live TV signals can bridge the oceans and improved telephone transmissions can reach the remotest parts of the globe.

1928: James Dewey Watson is born in Chicago. In 1953, working with Francis Crick, he discovers the double-helix molecular structure of DNA, the building block of life (and of the biotechnology industry).

1917: In an emergency Sunday session, the U.S. Congress formally declares war against Germany in response to Pres. Woodrow Wilson's call that "the world must be made safe for democracy." The next day, on fears that the war will cripple the U.S. economy, the Dow Jones Industrial Average drops 1.6% to 93.10.