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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sun-tzu who wrote (148064)	2/3/2002 2:46:58 PM
From: At_The_Ask	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 436258

There were investment trusts in '29. I presume they were something like mutual funds. "In spite of continued optimism and warnings against bearish hysteria and declarations that, "masses of stock have passed from weakly held margin accounts to buyers who have no need of advances on their purchases," the period of indecision was rapidly drawing to a close." I remember the "weak hands to strong hands argument" in the early stages of the collapse. I think it was Maria who was so fond of this concept. Any time someone offers that argument I think it's time to sell. Strong hands didn't get that way by holding on to losers. They are probably the first ones to sell. "In his mid-month survey of business conditions, Col. Leonard P. Ayres, of the Cleveland Trust Company, compared conditions to the 'Rich man's panic of 1903', which J.P. Morgan attributed to an excessive amount of undigested securities. During 1929 there had been lavish outpourings of new securities and a mushroom growth of investment trusts; nor was the public any longer swallowing the new issues with its old avidity. Stocks, he thought, were passing from the hands of clear sighted speculators into the hands of ignoramuses." This from the New York Times Oct. 19 1929. "One of the stories which gained wide circulation wherever stock market tickers clicked yesterday was that Jesse L. Livermore, formerly one of the country's biggest speculators, is the leader of the bear clique that has been hammering away at the market for weeks, and that the particular weakness which developed in high-priced and pivotal stocks was to be attributed, in part at least to his activities. (HEHE Jesse was the man!) Arthur W. Cutten of Chicago, the recognized leader of the bull party, watched the ticker from his hotel in Atlantic City yesterday and told close friends that nothing had developed to change his opinion about the market-that good stocks would eventually sell higher." Some excerpts from a book about the crash of '29. These are from the very beginning of the decline and aren't really comparable to our current position in the timeline. Unfortunately the book doesn't cover all the way to the end of the bear and the subsequent rally. If I had had this book in 2000 I could have done very well. The historical stuff is pretty cool IMO and the similarities to todays bubble are pretty amazing. One difference is that most of the little guys got wiped out in the early stages of the '29 bear whereas today they are still around.