Quite The Dow Drop

I took a short break today to watch an historic event. It wasn’t intentional, but I caught the stock market dropping like a rock this afternoon. If you missed it, in less than an hour it went a bit like this:

Hey, look, the DOW is down 500! Wow.

Oh my, it’s down 785.  Yes, that’s what it says.

Wait, they just updated again. Down about 985 points now.

Whoa! Over 1,000. 

Now it’s down 1,350. Uh, what’s going on?

Almost 1500! Over 6%.

And then the corrections kicked in and it slowly climbed back to a mere 850 point drop. Phew, just 850!

Early stories couldn’t keep up it was happenening so fast. They said that in addition to nervous investors selling madly, computer trading programs kicked in as things dropped to make things worse. It was the largest point drop in history.

…

When I was born in the early 1960’s, the Dow Jones had not yet reached 1,000 points. (If it had dropped 1,500, it would have been in negative territory.) It first crossed the 1,000 mark in 1972.

When I graduated college and entered the workplace, the Dow had not yet reached 2,000. The largest decline to date happened that year – a drop of 86.1 points in 1986. It crossed the 2,000 mark in 1987.

Black Monday of 1987 had a Dow drop of 508 points, or 22.6 percent.

In 1999, the Dow crossed the 10,000 mark. And the 11,000 mark. At the peak of the dot com bubble, the Dow was at 11,722.98.

It was 2014 when the Dow crossed the 18,000 mark for the first time. And only recently have we been creeping up toward 30,000.

…

I’ve been watching things go up and down all my life, but this drop seemed especially notable. One to remember.