50 Fun Facts About Stock Market

Which scientist lost a fortune in the South Sea Bubble and reportedly blamed 'the madness of people'?

Isaac Newton lost at least £10,000, a fortune worth millions now, when the South Sea Company collapsed around 1720. He was Master of the Mint, in charge of Britain's coinage, at the time.

Which motorcycle maker trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol HOG?

Harley-Davidson swapped its plain ticker HDI for HOG in 2006. The nickname goes back to a 1920s racing team of farm boys who kept a live pig as their mascot.

Which animal gives its name to a stock market that has fallen 20% or more from a recent high?

Bear is usually traced to 18th-century London's 'bear-skin jobbers', who sold shares they did not yet own, like a hunter selling the skin before catching the animal.

Which flower's bulbs sold for over ten times a skilled artisan's yearly income in a 1637 Dutch bubble?

Tulip prices collapsed in February 1637, when traders could no longer find buyers at ever-higher prices. The mania is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble in history.

Which fictional financier says 'greed, for lack of a better word, is good' in the 1987 film Wall Street?

Gordon Gekko's speech was adapted from a real 1986 graduation address by financier Ivan Boesky. The role won Michael Douglas the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Which investor, nicknamed the 'Oracle of Omaha', turned textile maker Berkshire Hathaway into a vast holding company?

Warren Buffett bought his first three shares at age 11. He later called the Berkshire textile business his worst trade, even though its name ended up on his whole empire.

What has signaled the start and end of each trading day at the New York Stock Exchange since 1903?

A bell took over from a gong when the exchange moved into its Broad Street building in 1903. Pressing the button that rings it has become a ceremony for celebrities and company executives.

Which retailer's shares leapt from about $17 to nearly $500 in January 2021 as Reddit's WallStreetBets forum piled in?

GameStop's surge handed heavy losses to hedge funds that had bet against the video game chain. Some brokers halted buying of the shares, which led to a hearing in the US Congress.

Which city's stock exchange, begun in 1602 to trade Dutch East India Company shares, is considered the world's oldest?

Amsterdam's exchange began as a secondary market, a place where the company's first investors could sell their shares on to someone else instead of waiting years for a voyage to pay off.

Which poker-derived term describes shares in large, well-established companies known for reliable profits?

Blue chip comes from poker sets, in which the blue chips traditionally carry the highest value. The stock sense is said to have been coined in the 1920s by Oliver Gingold as he stood watching a ticker.

What name is given to the share of a company's profits paid out to its stockholders, often every three months?

Dividend payments usually arrive quarterly in the US but only once a year in Germany. The Dutch East India Company was the first recorded public company to pay them regularly.

Which three-letter abbreviation describes a private company selling its shares to the public for the very first time?

IPO stands for initial public offering, the moment a company's shares are listed on an exchange. In the United States, the first was the sale of shares in the Bank of North America around 1783.

Which bronze animal did sculptor Arturo Di Modica leave outside the New York Stock Exchange without permission in 1989?

A bull weighing 7,100 pounds, the statue was hauled away by police within a day. The city then gave it a temporary spot on Broadway nearby, where it became a tourist landmark.

Which word for an investor's full set of holdings comes from the Italian for a case for carrying loose papers?

Portfolio comes from portafoglio, which joins the Italian words for 'carry' and 'sheet'. Spreading one across many different kinds of asset is a standard way to reduce risk.

Which measure, share price multiplied by shares outstanding, sorts companies into small, mid and large?

Market cap is an abbreviation of market capitalization. It counts only what the shares are worth, so analysts who also want to weigh a company's debts turn to enterprise value.

Which crime, dealing in shares on confidential company information, was central to the 1980s Ivan Boesky scandal?

Insider trading ended Boesky's career in 1986. He paid a record $100 million penalty and went to prison after informing on other financiers.

Which US agency, created in 1934 in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash, regulates the stock market?

The SEC had Joseph P. Kennedy, father of President John F. Kennedy, as its first chairman. Franklin D. Roosevelt chose him partly for his own experience on Wall Street.

Which stock index is named after a journalist and a statistician who founded a financial news company in 1882?

The Dow Jones honours Charles Dow and Edward Jones. Their index debuted in 1896 with just 12 industrial stocks and went on to track 30 large American companies.

Which American stock exchange opened for business in 1971 as the world's first fully electronic market?

Nasdaq began as a screen-based quotation system, with the trades themselves agreed by telephone until 1984. Its name was an acronym for National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations.

Which country's leading stock index, the Nikkei 225, took 34 years to regain the peak it hit in 1989?

Japan's best-known index is named after the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the newspaper that took it over in 1970. Its 1989 bubble-era record was finally beaten in February 2024.

What name is given to a company dividing each of its shares into several cheaper ones, such as two for one?

Stock split arithmetic leaves every holding worth exactly what it was before: twice the shares at half the price. Companies do it because a very high share price can put off small investors.

Which instruction tells a broker to buy a share only at a named price or lower, even if the trade never happens?

Limit order users control the price they pay but risk never being filled. A market order is the reverse: it executes immediately at whatever the going price happens to be.

What is the gap between a share's highest bid and lowest asking price, a hidden cost of every trade, called?

The spread is one measure of a market's liquidity, or how easily shares change hands. Along with brokerage fees, it makes up almost all of the cost of trading on an exchange.

What phrase describes purchasing shares with money borrowed from a broker, a habit that deepened the 1929 crash?

Buying on margin was loosely regulated in the 1920s, when loans covering up to 90 percent of a purchase were not uncommon. As prices fell, forced sales to repay those loans pushed them lower.

Which type of investment fund, launched in the US in 1993 as 'Spiders', trades on an exchange like a single share?

An ETF, or exchange-traded fund, holds a whole basket of investments. The 1993 original, Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts, became the largest fund of its kind in the world.

Which ratio, usually shortened to two initials, divides the cost of one share by a company's profit per share?

Price-to-earnings ratios of around 10 to 20 are widely treated as fairly priced, though the range shifts from one industry to another. The ratio is usually written P/E.

What term describes the profit from selling a share for more than it cost, taxed less in the US after a year?

Capital gain rules in the US reward patience: assets held for more than one year are taxed at a lower rate. The term covers any asset sold above its purchase price, not only shares.

Which grim phrase, first reported in 1985, describes a brief recovery in a falling share price before it drops again?

Dead cat bounce comes from the idea that even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height. Its earliest press citation described the Singaporean and Malaysian markets in December 1985.

Which month completes the old investing adage 'Sell in ___ and go away', a warning about weak summer returns?

May opens the six months that the adage says to sit out. The idea is also called the Halloween indicator, because the stronger half of the year for shares is said to run from November to April.

What electrical term names the rule that halts all US share trading for 15 minutes after a 7% market drop?

Circuit breaker rules were brought in after the 1987 crash to give panicking traders time to think. A 20% fall halts trading for the rest of the day.

Which US president was in his first year in office when the Wall Street Crash of 1929 struck?

Herbert Hoover had been in the White House for less than a year when share prices collapsed. His opponents later named the shanty towns of the homeless 'Hoovervilles' to discredit him.

What name was given to 19 October 1987, when Wall Street shares suffered a record one-day fall of 22.6 percent?

Black Monday struck stock exchanges around the globe, with worldwide losses estimated at $1.71 trillion. Because of time zone differences, some parts of the world remember it as Black Tuesday.

Which name is given to the late-1990s mania for internet company shares that peaked in March 2000 and then collapsed?

The dot-com boom ended with the leading index of technology shares losing 78% of its value by October 2002. Its casualties included Pets.com and Webvan.

Which Houston energy company, named America's most innovative six years running, collapsed in a 2001 accounting fraud?

Enron's fall also finished off its auditor, Arthur Andersen, then one of the world's biggest accounting firms. The scandal led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which toughened penalties for destroying records.

Which New York financier was sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009 for running history's largest Ponzi scheme?

Bernie Madoff was turned in by his own sons, after confessing to them that his investment business was 'one big lie'. He had once been chairman of a major American stock exchange.

Which Wall Street investment bank, 158 years old, filed the largest bankruptcy in US history in September 2008?

Lehman Brothers held over $600 billion in assets when it failed. It had begun as a dry-goods store in Montgomery, Alabama, whose owners accepted raw cotton as payment for merchandise.

Which British bank, founded in 1762, was ruined in 1995 by rogue trader Nick Leeson's losses in Singapore?

Barings had helped to finance the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States. After Leeson's fraudulent trades lost £827 million, the Dutch bank ING bought what was left for the nominal sum of £1.

What name was given to the 36 minutes in 2010 when US shares briefly lost about $1 trillion in value?

The Flash Crash did most of its damage within minutes before prices recovered. US prosecutors later charged a British trader who worked from his parents' house in suburban west London.

Which television host and homemaking mogul served five months in prison over a 2001 sale of ImClone shares?

Martha Stewart was convicted in 2004 of obstruction and lying to investigators, not of the trade itself, which had avoided a loss of about $45,000. Her company's flotation had made her a billionaire on paper.

Which banker pledged his own money and rallied fellow financiers to halt Wall Street's Panic of 1907?

J. P. Morgan summoned bank presidents to the library of his Madison Avenue home to hammer out a rescue. The scare led Congress to investigate, and from that came the Federal Reserve System.

Which actor played fraudulent stockbroker Jordan Belfort in Martin Scorsese's 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street?

Leonardo DiCaprio and Warner Bros. bought the rights to Belfort's memoir in 2007. The real Belfort spent 22 months in prison for scams that cost investors about $200 million.

Which 2015 film, based on a Michael Lewis book, follows investors who bet against the US housing market before 2008?

The Big Short won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Christian Bale was nominated for playing Michael Burry, the fund manager who spots that the housing market is unstable.

Which company became the first publicly traded US firm to be valued at over $1 trillion, in August 2018?

Apple crossed the line on August 2, 2018, then needed only two more years to double it, becoming the first US company worth $2 trillion in August 2020.

Which inventor developed the Universal Stock Ticker, one of the earliest practical machines for printing share prices?

Thomas Edison's machine printed share prices at about one character per second. An earlier ticker business had made him some money in Boston, which he lost trying to expand to New York.

Which 'father of value investing' wrote The Intelligent Investor in 1949 and taught at Columbia Business School?

Benjamin Graham also co-wrote Security Analysis, the other founding text of his discipline, with David Dodd in 1934. He had gone to work on Wall Street after graduating from Columbia at 20.

Which founder of the Vanguard Group started the first index mutual fund in 1975, a product critics called a folly?

Jack Bogle's fund simply bought the whole market instead of trying to beat it, an approach derided at the time as un-American. He is credited with popularizing index investing.

Which Gilded Age financier, known as the richest woman in America, was nicknamed the 'Witch of Wall Street'?

Hetty Green lent freely to financiers and city governments during financial panics, including the one in 1907. Guinness World Records nevertheless listed her for a time as the 'greatest miser'.

Which US city opened the country's first stock exchange in 1790, two years before New York's brokers organized?

Philadelphia's exchange began as the Board of Brokers, meeting at the Merchants Coffee House, a building also known as the City Tavern.

Which Indian city is home to Asia's oldest stock exchange, where brokers first traded under a banyan tree?

Mumbai's exchange grew from five brokers who gathered under a banyan tree in front of the Town Hall in the 1850s. Formally established in 1875, it kept the city's old name, Bombay.

Under which kind of tree did 24 New York stockbrokers traditionally meet before founding their exchange in 1792?

A buttonwood, another name for the American sycamore, gave its name to the agreement the brokers signed in 1792. That document is the founding charter of the New York Stock Exchange.