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Ok, semantics. then. I'm NOT saying the market didn't tank big time. But I
consider a crash to be somewhat of a catastrophic event.
To the best of my recollection,that didn't happen in 73-74. There was no
daily or weekly bar you could point to and say "yep, there's where the
market crashed." In some ways, I consider what happened in 73-74 more
insidious than 1929.
Bear market? Defininitely. Crash? I guess that depends how you define crash.
>Richard wrote:
>
>> I don't really worry about the stock market very much since I have a
>> long-term horizon and don't "trade" the S&P very much, but it seems that
>> many traders and observers seem to focus on whether/when the market will
>> "crash."
>>
>> I submit that there's another scenario to be concerned about -- at least in
>> the medium term (2-5 years). Perhaps the market won't crash. Maybe it will
>> just die.
>>
>> When I was about 11 or 12 years old or so, I began to venture off the
>> comics pages of the newspaper and discovered the financial section. My
>> father explained to me what all the numbers were, what a P/E ratio was,
>> what the difference between a bond and a stock was, etc.
>>
>> He was basically a buy and hold guy (still is!) but to help me develop my
>> interest in this area, he suggested I keep a chart of all his stocks. I
>> charted the weekly close of each of about 25 stocks in his portfolio.
>>
>> This period was in the early seventies and it was a rough one. There was no
>> "crash" per se, but week after week, month after month, stock prices
>> drifted down, down, down. It was pretty demoralizing. I think my dad's
>> portfolio went down by about 35% over that two-year bear market in 73-74.
>> In fact, I remember having to "rechart" a few stocks because the prices
>> went below the scale I'd used. (This was on paper, no computers back then
>> -- except we might have had Pong!)
>>
>> Now I realize that times were much different then. The energy markets were
>> haywire and inflation was high, but today you could construct a scenario
>> where there is no crash, but a new tide forms that drags the equity markets
>> gradually ever lower for a few years.
>>
>> I kept up my charting until I replaced bulls and bears with sex, drugs and
>> rock and roll.
>>
>> -RB
>
> RB, I must disagree. The '73-'74 bear market was a the biggest stockk
>market crash since 1929. From theDJIA high print on January 11, 1973 of 1061
>and the DJIA low print on December 6, 1974 of 574, the DJIA lost 46%. Yes, the
>volume was painfully slow, with volume often less than 9 million share per
>day. It was a long, slow, persistent, and insidious bear market crash, but a
>crash none the less.
>
>Barely,
>
>Norman
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