Chapter Sixteen

Crisis in 1998: The Trading Goddess Returns

October 8, judging from the closing levels of the major averages, seemed like a pretty unspectacular day. The Dow Jones Average shed 9 points, around .1 percent to close at 7731.91. The Nazzdogs took it a little worse, losing 3 percent, or 43 points. Thirty-year bonds dropped about a point and a half, bringing their yields to 5 percent on the nose. The dollar got clocked, giving up a big chunk of that year's gains.

But these numbers masked the most important day of the last decade of investing, because on October 8, the bear market of 1998, the vicious, gut-wrenching, horrid decline that had taken stocks well past their two- and three-year lows, and brought some averages down to as low as 40 percent off their highs, came to an end. On October 8, a dreary, chilly rainy Thursday in New York, a day so out-of-kilter that even the Dow Jones Averages didn't trade at the opening (that was the day that Travelers switched into Citigroup, causing a confusing delay that kept people in the dark about the true prices of the averages until a half hour into trading), the stock market bottomed.

At eighteen minutes after 12:00 P. ... read full excerpt from: Confessions of a Street Addict ebook