2001: Kenneth Lay, chairman and chief executive of Enron Corp., leads an employee Internet chat in which he urges the company's workers to "talk up the stock" and declares: "My personal belief is that Enron stock is an incredible bargain at current prices and we will look back a couple of years from now and see the great opportunity that we currently have." That "great opportunity," at least for Lay, is selling: So far in 2001, he has been selling massive amounts of Enron stock, pocketing tens of millions of dollars in gains. When he tells employees, "Our financial liquidity has never been stronger," perhaps Lay is referring to his own household's balance sheet. On December 2, Enron will file for bankruptcy protection.

Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (New York: Portfolio, 2003), p. 367;The New York Times, January 15, 2002, pp. A1, C1, C9.

1988: "Buy Stocks? No Way!" hollers a headline in Time magazine. "Wild horses couldn't drag me back into stocks. Rather than gamble in this market, I might as well go to Las Vegas," retail investor Curtis Beusman tells Time. "Eleven months after last year's crash," adds Time, "most individual investors are avoiding stocks as if they were poison. Some Wall Street executives fear that many of these investors may be leaving the market for good…. Says Hardwick Simmons, vice chairman of Shearson Lehman Hutton: 'The small investor is an endangered species.' "

Time, September 26, 1988, p. 54.

1955: President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffers a heart attack, and the stock market has a coronary right with him, plunging by 6.62%–which even today remains one of the worst daily losses of the past 100 years.

Robert J. Shiller, "Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to Be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?" in Richard H. Thaler, ed., Advances in Behavioral Finance (Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1993), p. 144;Yale Hirsch, 2000 Stock Trader's Almanac, p. 154