2000: Lucent Technologies announces that it is buying Chromatis Networks, an optical networking company, for $4.5 billion. Bob Barron, chief executive of Chromatis, predicts that his company will bring in "several hundred million dollars" in revenues over the next year, even though Chromatis has virtually no customers yet. Says one analyst: "Lucent paid on the order of $29 million per employee?that's just about what you have to spend to scoop up an optical equipment start-up these days." In August, 2001 — just 15 months later — Chromatis goes down as one of the most overpriced acquisitions of all time, as Lucent shuts it down after attracting only two customers. Maybe $29 million per employee was a bit much to pay after all.

Financial Times, August 29, 2001, p. 1, and September 1/September 2, 2001, p. XXIII

1977: A 33-year-old unknown named Peter Lynch begins managing the Fidelity Magellan Fund. Absolutely nobody notices or cares outside of Fidelity, and Magellan remains closed to new investors until 1981.

Corporate communications department, Fidelity Investments.

1974: The first money-market mutual fund with checkwriting privileges, Fidelity Daily Income Trust, opens for business. It's a new weapon in mutual funds' battle with banks: Instead of having to wait seven days to receive a redemption, investors can now use a mutual fund just like a checking account — and the fund, Fidelity's first no-load offering, rakes in more than $800 million in its first ten months.

Diana B. Henriques, Fidelity's World: The Secret Life and Public Power of the Mutual Fund Giant (Scribner, New York, 1995), pp. 208-209.

1919: The New York Stock Exchange closes its doors for the day, so that frenzied clerks can clear the paperwork from a tumultuous month during which volume regularly exceeded an astonishing 1.5 million shares a day.

Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1997, reprint of 1931 ed.), p. 6;Phyllis S. Pierce, ed., The Dow Jones Averages 1885-1980 (DowJones Irwin, Homewood, IL, 1982), not paginated