20 Smashing Facts about the Stock Market

1. "The term Black Friday originally referred to the stock market crashes of the 1800s." - u/MadeleineDean

2. "Superbowl Indicator. A theory that if a team from the old American Football League pre-1970 wins the Super Bowl, the stock market will decline during the coming year. If a team from the old pre-1990 National Football League wins the Super Bowl, stock prices will increase." - u/AMadFreak

3. "During the Dot.com stock market boom from 1995 - 1999 the NASDAQ went up on average 41.89% a year. This peaked in 1999 with an annual gain of 85.59%" - u/mrusch74

4. "in 1834, two French stock brokers were able to sneak messages into the government's semaphore telegraph system, letting them know about the movements of the Paris stock market five days ahead of local competitors in Bordeaux" - u/shitthrower

5. "The world’s first stock market IPO was by the Dutch East India Company in 1602" - u/WallStreetDoesntBet

6. "I learned that stock market fraud has been around since the 16-18th centuries" - u/Bruhmage

7. "The Great Depression was not caused solely by the Stock Market Crash. It was caused by people panic-pulling all of their money out of the bank, defaulting on their loans, and crashing the bank's infrastructure. In turn, people lost jobs and went broke." - u/A1Mkiller

8. "Bombay Stock Exchange, the The oldest Stock Market in Asia was started In the 1850s when five stock brokers gathered together under a Banyan tree in front of Mumbai City Town Hall" - u/GL4389

9. "In the 1980, two oil-family brothers attempted to buy all the silver in the world to drive up the price and corner the market. They ended up buying up the rights to an estimated 1/3 of the entire world supply of silver. New rules had to be enacted on the stock market to stop them." - u/a-horse-has-no-name

10. "There was no epidemic of suicides in the wake of the Stock Market Crash of 1929." - u/4ippaJ

11. "The Poseidon bubble was a stock market bubble in which the price of Australian mining shares soared in late 1969, then crashed in early 1970. It was triggered by the discovery by Poseidon Nickel of the early indications of a promising nickel deposit in September 1969."

12. "In April 2013 a fake AP tweet saying the White House had been bombed caused a stock market "flash crash" - u/cypothingy

13. "In May 2010, a trillion-dollar US stock market crash occurred which lasted only 36 minutes before recovering most of the loss. The causes are still debated today." - u/Mentalbutsmart

14. "By using a man in the middle, two brothers hacked the French optical telegraph system to gain advanced information on the stock market. When they got caught two years later, they walked away as free men because in 1836 there were no laws against hacking" - u/Brutal_Deluxe

15. "Some of the first "stock" was tracked using split wood. That's where the "stock market" comes from. Literal pieces of split wood stocks." - u/big-mr-jinks

16. "American Civil War led to the first stock market crash in India (British India). "In the preceding years, speculation about the results of the American civil war had led to irrational increases of stocks of new Indian companies." - u/KartikHarit

17. "Jesse Livermore who shorted the stock market in 1929, made $100m (over $1b in todays dollars) then lost it all."

18. "Vincent Kosuga, who is the reason why the US government banned the trading of futures contracts on onions on the stock market." - u/Mydadpicksthefruit

19. "Spanish porn star Nacho Vidal was born into a very wealthy family. However, most of the family's wealth was lost on Black Monday, the stock market crash of 1987. In 2005, using his porn star income, Vidal bought back the mansion his family used to own." - u/sexpressed

20. "300 years ago, Sir Isaac Newton lost the equivalent of millions of dollars in the first stock market bubble." - u/Mujokan