Triple trouble

Excerpt

When I was 14 years old in August 1974 my Dad asked me to help him with something that had been bothering him for months: why were the world financial markets dropping and why had that decline become so exaggerated? He showed me financial newsletters with charts detailing the bear market of 1973–1974 which had been the largest worldwide percentage loss since the Great Depression. Within several hours of studying them and doing additional research at Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library, I made the fascinating discovery that similar bear markets had occurred frequently through the decades. I was surprised how many of the sharpest drops during these bear markets had occurred near the opening bell on Mondays and wondered if it was merely a strange coincidence. In 1986 Yale Hirsch’s book Don’t Sell Stocks on Monday highlighted that others had observed some of the same illogical-seeming patterns. …