Did you know? You can go to any day’s “This Day in History” page by simply entering the month and date after www.begintoinvest.com/
For example: www.begintoinvest.com/May-9
Or follow Begin To Invest on Twitter or Facebook for daily posts!
Now, ‘This Day in History’ is also available as an Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing!
Quote of the Day
“The additional rise of this stock above the true capital will be only imaginary; one added to one, by any rules of vulgar arithmetic, will never make 3 1/2; consequently, all the fictitious value must be a loss to some person or other, first or last. The only way to prevent it to oneself must be to sell out betimes, and so let the devil take the hindmost.”
Source: Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation
April 14th – This Day in Stock Market History
April 14th, 1720 – Shares of South Sea Company are sold to the public for the first time.
£2 million worth of shares are offered at £300 per share, and crowds would line the streets for a chance to buy.
The shares of the South Sea Company sell out within an hour – helped by the fact that “investors” only needed to put down a 20% deposit of the purchase price of the shares, and could borrow to pay for the remaining purchase price and repay over the next 16 months.
Of course, the South Sea Bubble will be burst by then.
Source: Devil Take the Hindmost
April 14th, 1865 – President Lincoln shot around 9:30pm at Ford ‘s Theatre, he would die 1 day later.
The following day, after news of Lincoln’s death, the New York Stock Exchange would close for the day.
Source: Wall Street And The Stock Markets: A Chronology (1644-1971)
April 14th, 2000: The NASDAQ has its worst day ever (at the time), plunging 355.49 points, or 9.67%, to finish at 3321.29, down 25.3% for the week.
The tech bubble had peaked a month prior, on March 10th, 2000, with the NASDAQ closing briefly over 5,000.
Investors in the once hot technology stocks were now losing a quarter of their investment in just a week. By mid April 2000, the NASDAQ had fallen close to 50%, and by September 2002 it will have fallen about 80%.
Best April 14th in Dow Jones Industrial Average History
1932 – Up 3.42%, 2.09 points.
Worst April 14th in Dow Jones Industrial Average History
2000 – Down 5.66%, 617.78 points.
Read of the Day
The Nasdaq’s record drop on this day is just a small piece of the story that was the dot-com bubble of the late 90’s. One of my favorite Wall Street history books, and certainly my favorite on the tech bubble, is Bull! by Maggie Mahar. You can read our review of it here:
Bull! 3 Lessons learned from the tech bubble
<– Go To Previous Day: April 13th: 1902 – J.C Penny opens his first store, total daily sales: $33
Go To Next Day: April 15th: 1912 – The Titanic sinks –>
