Crash

I remember learning about stocks for economics class in 1987. This was my first exposure to what a stock was—a fractional share of ownership in the business it represents—and to how important they were to the economy.

I’m afraid I wasn’t initially very interested in stocks. However, my timing couldn’t have been better: the biggest single-day loss in the stock market happened on October 19th of that year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 508 points in a single day, or 22.6% of its total.

Interestingly enough, I have also lived through the second biggest single-day percentage drop in the history of the Dow. That happened on March 16th, 2020, just as the coronavirus pandemic began to grip the finance and business worlds, and I got to witness that distant second place: a 12.9% decline.

The 1987 crash came to be called Black Monday, after its infamous predecessor Black Tuesday. In financial jargon, black is indicative of a loss, and both of these days saw gut-wrenching losses in …