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The machines couldn’t keep up.
By mid-afternoon, the ticker tape in lower Manhattan was running more than two hours behind the actual selling. Brokers were quoting prices that were already outdated, and, in a single session, the Dow Jones shed nearly 6%. It was the worst one-day drop since the Crash of 1929. The next day, the morning papers declared the postwar bull market dead.
They called it Blue Monday, the depths of the “Kennedy Slide” of 1962. The S&P 500 fell roughly 27% from its highs. Yet, within 14 months, the market had clawed back every lost point. The boom that supposedly died that spring went on to run for several more years.
Sound familiar?
