#market history

There’s a famous claim that stocks underperform on Mondays and outperform on Fridays. The pattern was real for decades. Whether it’s still real is a more interesting question than most articles bother to ask.

October 29, 1929 wasn’t even the worst day of the 1929 crash, and it didn’t cause the Great Depression on its own. But it was the day the music permanently stopped, and it’s worth understanding what actually happened.

On October 19, 1987, the Dow fell 22.6% in a single day. There was no war, no bank failure, no terror attack. The crash was caused by the safety mechanism that was supposed to prevent crashes.

In October 1907, the United States had no central bank. When one of New York’s biggest trust companies started to fail, J.P. Morgan locked Wall Street’s top financiers in his library and didn’t let them leave until they’d saved the system.

October is the month investors fear, and the data partly justifies it. Three of the worst days in market history happened in October. The average return is fine. Both things are true.