CHAPTER FOUR
Market Risk
“The difference between playing the stock market and playing the horses is that one of the horses must win.” ~ Joey Adams
here are a lot of things I don’t miss from the 1990s. Flip phones that could barely text. Beanie Babies that somehow convinced millions of adults to buy stuffed animals. Win- dows 95. But one thing from the 90s I miss every day is the stock market. The 1990s were real go-go years in the market. You could pick almost any stock and it would go up. You could actually invest in something called “Dart Funds,” where a stockbroker threw a dart at a sheet of stocks and invested in whichever ones the dart hit. And you know what? Dart Funds were making good money! We all know where the go-go years of the 1990s ended: the dot- com bubble burst. And boy, did that bubble burst hard in 2000. According to Investopedia, from March 11, 2000, to October 9, 2002, the technology-heavy NASDAQ lost 78 percent of its value, falling from 5046.86 at its peak and bottoming at 1114.11, when the implosion ended. The troubles of the stock market were not limited to just technologies. The S&P 500®, the barometer by T
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