Friends
As you all know, every October 19th I reminisce a little bit about the anniversary of the stock market crash of 1987 (Black Monday). You may remember it was my 3rd year in the business and it was a moment in time that I will never forget (I still have the next day’s Wall Street Journal in my desk – ask me about it next time you come by). The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points that day which doesn’t sound like a big deal nowadays but in 1987 that represented a 22.6% drop. To put that in perspective a 22.6% drop at today’s level would be about 8000 Dow points. Yikes. Anyway, the most important thing I learned from that experience was that all pullbacks, downturns, crashes, bear markets are temporary. Some may take longer than others to recover from, but markets, capitalism and “the American way” are resilient.
But I digress. As for today, by the close the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 198 points to finish the day at 35,457. The S&P 500 was up 33 points to close at 4,519. The Nasdaq Composite Index was up 107 points to close at 15,129. Gold was up $4 to trade at $1,770 per ounce, while oil was up $.44 to trade at $82.88 per barrel WTI.
J&J had good earnings today, and we are going to get a look at Netflix’s earnings after the close today. As for Black Monday in 1987, as painful as it was as a young Merrill Lynch “broker” in those days, it helped set me on a course of understanding the importance of human behavior when it comes to the stock market. That lesson was invaluable.
Have a nice evening everyone.
