To: ViperChick Secret Agent 006.9 who wrote (12446 ) 7/20/1998 2:32:00 PM From: Chris Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 42787
great post i got from priv. message: author not mentioned due to my respect for his privacy. anyone else with opinions and feelings of the 1987 crash, let me know. don't be shy <gg> i really enjoyed that post BTW. I wanted to comment on some of your 1987 questions but not to clutter the thread. In the three months before the October crash, interest rates went from 9% to 10.5%. The friday before the crash, the DOW dropped over 100pts or about 4%. There was this thing called "portfolio insurance", a term that has become reviled on the street for the carnage that ensued. A drop in asset value could be programmed so that when stocks dropped, your entire portfolio could be sold by computer generated orders. The most popular trigger level was 5%. Over the weekend preceding the crash, James Baker, secretary of state became angry and the level of US exports going to Japan. (too few) He held a press conference where he announced that he was going to let the US dollar freefall so that american products could be more competitive. F<beep> idiot. Every extranational in the world decided to pull all their money out of the US market on Monday. It did take three years on average to get even from this drop. Those professionals that had naked puts in their portfolio ( a very common practice), were wiped out and more than a few committed suicide. But that's nothing. It took 25 years to recover from the bear of '29 to '32. Shouldn't even be called a bear; more like a ravenous rabid tyranosaur. Stocks like high flying GE went from 396 to 8 and the best performer, AT$T (T) only lost three quarters of it's value. There was a ten to one margin rule in effect at the time. Imagine the leverage. You put up 10,000 and buy a stock. It doubles. You can now buy 100,000 more of stock. It doubles again. you see were this is going and how fast it could fall apart. 1965/66 to 1982/83 was a flat period for the market. Given the inflation level of the time, this was probably the worst years or performance ever for the market on a value basis. All in all, even with these horrible scenarios figured in, equities have outperformed all other investments over time. They have to have periods like recently in order to make that claim.