For the 24th anniversary of one of America’s funnest days (the 1987 crash), I compiled some nostalgic videos for your bearshitters out there.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04_Y2rTSBms 603 500] [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MyToTwag34 603 500] [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9iE-bn0xBU&feature=related 603 500] [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PUwr8DsYeg 603 500] [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCUsb3y0Sr4 603 500] [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFn1G2goDQw&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PLC11059F8336E2317 603 500] [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm_4j-_Dnwc&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PLC11059F8336E2317 603 500] [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_fxEoF8Vl8&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PLC11059F8336E2317 603 500] If you enjoy the content at iBankCoin, please follow us on Twitter
Joined Nov 10, 2007
23,449 Blog Posts
where is Louis Rukeyser ???
dead
Really miss Lou. He was always so calm and rational. There’s nothing like that left in teevee financial punditry anymore…it’s all ADHD babble and people yelling over each other now.
I posted my recollections in 12631.
flash crash before it was cool!
I have 30 hours of video of the Crash of 1987. I was painting outside windows and watch FNN thru the windows.
I had a $63,000 account with a small credit balance that I sold OEX 300 puts against for 25 cents each the preceding Friday. (twenty; $500 total). They went to
155 during the crash – taking my account from $63K plus to a QUARTER MILLION MINUS!
My total net worth including house was maybe $150K so I was in deep doo-doo. But
the margin clerks missed me on Tuesday the
20th; and I shorted ten $250 puts for $140
each early Tuesday; and the market turned around, and by the end of the week my account was worth about $5K. By early December my account was back to $65K and all was well.
I replayed those Monday Crash videos ten years later – I remembered EVERY SENTENCE that was coming up before it came up!
Dayum! I was too young to remember this day, but this story gave me chills.
@Rigged – Your story reminds me of an incident from Summer of 1987. A group of us were going to a baseball game, when the talk turned to the market. There was a young stock broker (well we all were very young), who told me how he was managing his customers accounts. He was selling puts against them as it was a “sure thing”. This included a “wealthy elderly women who he said enjoyed the income from his activities”.
I used to wonder what befell him and his customers after the crash.
Fly, if I’m reading between the lines, are you suggesting something wicked this way comes??
I had only been in the market for a few years in ’87 so while it was a lot of loss for me at the time, in retrospect it was a valuable lesson.
I can almost smell the Old Spice.
Those are some great clips from “Wall Street Week.” Zweig made a legendary call and I love the bullshit coming from Schreyer right after the crash: “Now would be a good time to buy.” He was right, of course, but if you’d asked him the same thing three weeks earlier, he undoubtedly would have said the same thing, lol.
I was in my mid-20s when this happened and in a different business (commercial real estate). However, I was a casual student of the markets and knew right away that the crash was caused by portfolio insurance rather than anything fundamental, and therefore assumed that the markets would bounce right back. So late in the day of the crash I took everything I had (around $20,000) and bought six-month call options on all the biggest companies in America. Well, they all expired worthless because I had completely underestimated the psychological damage that the crash had done, and thus the time it would take for investors to get back into a “buying mood.” I have almost never used options since then– now, I just buy the stock, lol.