1999: The price/earnings ratio of the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index peaks at an all-time high of 35.97. The long-term average P/E for the market is just 15, but most analysts and investors remain unconcerned that the market could be overvalued. Less than two years later, the market's P/E has slipped to 24.39, and stocks have lost 9.7% of their value.

Martin S. Fridson, "Tech Wreck's Lessons for High Yield Investors," High Yield Strategy Report, Merrill Lynch & Co., March 15, 2001, p. 2.

1996: One of the first companies ever to go public with an exclamation point in its name, Yahoo! Inc., launches its IPO on NASDAQ, selling 2.6 million shares at an initial price of $13 a share. In one of Wall Street's wildest feeding frenzies of all time, mutual funds and other big investors "flip" the shares over and over, until the first day's trading volume hits 204.36 million shares (meaning that each share changes hands more than 78 times that day). The stock finishes with a 34% first-day gain.

1991: The NASDAQ Composite Index breaks the 500 barrier for the first time, closing at 501.62, up 2.31.

1948: A government agency gets one right for a change, as the National Labor Relations Board rules that Inland Steel Corp. must include pensions on its agenda during negotiations with the United Steel Workers labor union. Before long, unions across the country are demanding that blue-collar workers be allowed to participate in corporate pension plans, which traditionally had been available only to senior executives.

Michael J. Clowes, The Money Flood: How Pension Funds Revolutionized Investing (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 2000), p. 18.

1938: The federal penitentiary at Sing Sing gets a new inmate no one could have anticipated a few years earlier: the outgoing president of the New York Stock Exchange, Richard Whitney. Whitney has been sentenced to five to ten years of incarceration and banned from the securities industry for life after embezzling bonds from trust funds under his care. Dressed elegantly in a black overcoat, a bowler hat, and handcuffs, Whitney dodges a crowd of 5,000 angry investors and enters the prison without saying a word. He ends up being paroled for "model" behavior in August, 1941.

John Brooks, Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920-1938 (Harper & Row, New York, 1969), p. 276-277, 287.

1837: Immigrants William Procter, an English candlemaker, and James Gamble, an Irish soapmaker, open shop in Cincinnati. Both men had been heading further west but settled in Cincinnati, unable to face the ordeal of traveling hundreds of miles further westward on rugged roads. (Procter's wife died, and Gamble needed urgent medical care.) The business booms, and soon each man puts up $3,596.47 to launch Procter, Gamble & Co.