1999: Merrill Lynch announces that it is creating a fee-based financial planning business alongside its traditional commission-based brokerage business; investors will also be allowed to trade stocks themselves through Merrill Lynch's website. Merrill is finally acknowledging that not all investors want to pay for advice with every trade.

1980: Ted Turner launches the world's first round-the-clock TV news service, which he calls Cable News Network. Analysts almost unanimously predict that the new venture, nicknamed the Chicken Noodle Network, will be a disastrous failure.

1939: Stockbrokers are officially designated as "registered representatives." (Some of the other official titles that were considered — and rejected — include "solicitor," "account executive," and the mellifluous "securitor.")

"Today in NYSE History," at www.nyse.com/about/TodayInNYSE.html

1932: Benjamin Graham publishes the first of a three-part series of articles in Forbes Magazine in which he points out that "a great number of American businesses are quoted in the market for much less than their liquidating value; that in the best judgment of Wall Street, these businesses are worth more dead than alive." On the very same day, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index (measured retroactively) hits its all-time low of 4.40.

Benjamin Graham, "Inflated Treasuries and Deflated Stockholders: Are Corporations Milking Their Owners?" Forbes, June 1, 1932;David M. Blitzer, chief investment strategist, Standard & Poor's Corp.

1886: In one of the most sweeping industrial overhauls of all time, railroads across the South tear out their old 5-foot gauge rails and replace them with 4-foot, 9-inch gauge. Under the leadership of Louisville & Nashville Railway boss Milton Hannibal Smith, thousands of workers re-tool 13,000 miles of track in just two days. Now that trains no longer need to stop to make slow and costly adjustments to their wheels when they go South, freight traffic can move swiftly and smoothly throughout the entire U.S.

John F. Stover, The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads (Routledge, New York and London, 1999), p. 41.

1720: One of the biggest speculative bubbles in history nears its peak, as South Sea Co. stock shoots from 610 to 870 on June 1 and June 2. Among the people who think they are getting rich quick are Sir Godfrey Kneller, the greatest portrait painter in England; Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels; and probably King George I himself. Within weeks their hot returns will turn cold as ice, as South Sea shares drop all the way back down below 150.

John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (The Cresset Press, London, 1960), pp. 68, 73, 156-157.