One of my favorite parts about writing over the years is the regular feedback I get from readers.
People send me questions, ideas, charts, movie recommendations, books, old magazines and the occasional grammar/spell check.1
A reader recently shared with me that he’s been collecting Wall Street comics for a few decades. He wanted to send me the entire collection, clipped straight from newspapers and financial publications over the years.
I’m a sucker for a good finance comic so I was happy to sift through the whole pile and pick out some of my favorites to share.
The 1990s comics had two main focal points — tech stocks and Alan Greenspan.
I know there are a lot of comparisons right now between AI and the dot-com bubble the 1990s feel like they were in a different stratosphere:
When talking about my book a number of people asked me if we could ever see another Great Depression-like calamity in the stock market, which was down more than 80%.
You don’t have to go back that far to see this level of pain in tech stocks. The aftermath of the dot-com bubble was brutal.
The Nasdaq Composite was down nearly 80%. The Nasdaq 100 crashed more than 82%. That’s a Great Depression-like crash in tech stocks not all that long ago.
It was painful:
When the Nasdaq dropped almost 40% in 2000, the Down was down just 6%. In 2001, the Nasdaq dropped more than 20% while the Dow fell 7%.
Investors did have a place to hide out in the more boring dividend-paying blue chips:
Alan Greenspan made his now famous irrational exuberance speech in 1996. The dot-com bubble was just getting warmed up at that point. Greenspan was a larger-than-life figure in the markets back then.
Here’s a good one on the bubble times:
And another one:
Greenspan was a financial celebrity of sorts back then. Investors hung on his every word:
They even covered Greenspan on the B.C. comic strip:
This is one of my all-time favorites about the negativity bias in the financial media:
This one is similar:
That one came out in 2008 but could easily be used today.
There are not many bull market cartoons. There are a lot of good bear market comics.
This one is funny because it’s true!
Here’s another Nasdaq one:
Also true.
This is a good soft landing crossover with a bear market:
There were also a series of comics about how hard it is to predict the markets:
This one had to come from the likes of Barron’s:
Markets can twist your brain into a pretzel at times.
This one sounds like something I would say:
I’m glad this one was in the collection because it’s the greatest Wall Street comic of all-time:
It’s perfect.
As the kids like to say — no notes.
Further Reading:
“The market is rolling simply because it’s rolling” 1I surprised how much of this stuff still gets by the AI grammar police.