1999: Priceline.com goes public in one of the hottest initial offerings ever: priced at $16, the shares open at $26.625 and close the day at $69, a first-day return of 331% (for those lucky few who could get in at the offering price). Exactly a month later, the stock will hit $162.375 — but a mere year-and-a-half after the IPO, Priceline.com is trading at less than $5 per share.

The New York Times, October 6, 2000, p. C1.

1998: The bull market officially kills its last remaining brain cells as The Wall Street Journal prints an Op-Ed article by journalist James Glassman and economist Kevin Hassett entitled "Are Stocks Overvalued? Not a Chance." Glassman and Hassett, declaring that stocks are risk-free, show that they themselves are commonsense-free. Since stocks have "always" beaten bonds over 20-year holding periods in the past, Glassman and Hassett conclude that they always will in the future. Therefore, stocks should trade at a price-earnings ratio of around 100 — meaning that "the stock market is undervalued by a factor of four" and the Dow should be at around 36,000. The rest of 1998 and 1999 make Glassman and Hassett seem right. Then comes 2000-2002, the worst bear market in a generation, and stocks lose 38% of their value.

The Wall Street Journal, March 30, 1998, p. A17.

1867: U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward agrees to purchase the Alaskan territories from Russia for $7 million — a price so preposterous that newspapers around the country immediately tag the deal "Seward's Folly" and christen Alaska "the polar bear garden."