• 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: Most stock-exchange houses, however, still adhere to the old-time slogans that they are in business to make commissions and that the way to succeed in business is to give the customers what they want. Since the most profitable customers want speculative advice and suggestions, the thinking and activities of the typical firm are pretty closely geared to day-to-day trading in the market. Thus it tries hard to help its customers make money in a field where they are condemned almost by mathematical law to lose in the end.

    –Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor (New York: HarperBusiness, 2003), p. 262.
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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: Online traders spot a Bloomberg News Service page reporting the news that PairGain Technologies has agreed to be acquired by ECI Telecom at a rich premium over its current stock price. PairGain stock promptly soars 31%, then crashes as PairGain and Bloomberg announce that the news page is a fraudulent announcement cleverly designed to look like a genuine Bloomberg news report.

1979: Venture capitalist Robert Swanson and biochemist Herbert Boyer found Genentech, Inc. to develop new drugs by manipulating the molecular structure of DNA. They call their new firm a "biotechnology" company.

Financial Times, April 6, 2001, p. 11

1927: In history's first public television broadcast, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, speaking from an office in Washington, D.C., is viewed by a dumbstruck audience in the Bell Telephone Laboratories at 55 Bethune Street in New York City. "Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown," intones Hoover. "What its uses may finally be no one can tell." The New York Times, however, warns in its headline: "COMMERCIAL USE IN DOUBT."

The New York Times, "Far Off Speakers Seen as Well as Heard Here in a Test of Television," April 8, 1927, p. 1, in Floyd Norris and Christine Bockelmann, The New York Times Century of Business (McGraw-Hill, New York, 2000), pp. 68-71

1860: Will Keith Kellogg, future founder of the Kellogg Co., is born. Later, working for his brother, John H. Kellogg, he invents wheat flakes and founds the world's biggest maker of breakfast cereals.

1792: America's first market crash hits rock-bottom, as the price of 6% United States bonds slumps to 100 in panicky Philadelphia trading, down from 127.50 on January 31st, a 22% plunge in just 13 weeks.

David J. Cowen, "The First Bank of the United States and the Securities Market Crash of 1792," The Journal of Economic History, December, 2000 (Vol. 60, No. 4), pp. 1044, 1051.

1775: Francis Cabot Lowell, one of the founding fathers of the American industrial revolution, is born in Newburyport, Mass. In 1814, in Waltham, Mass., Lowell builds the first textile mill that can turn raw cotton into finished cloth.

1720: King George I, who appears to have been bribed with secret grants of stock and insider information, signs the South Sea Bill, granting virtual monopoly powers of financing to the South Sea Co. The stock closes the day at 335, up from less than 100 a few weeks earlier. By year-end, many investors will lose 80% of their money.

John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (The Cresset Press, London, 1960), pp. 124, 127.