The things worth knowing about the market.

Before he co-founded NVIDIA, Jensen Huang bussed tables and washed dishes at Denny’s. He has said the discipline of that first job shaped how he runs the company now worth trillions.

NVIDIA was conceived in 1993 in a booth at a Denny’s in San Jose, where its three founders sketched out a company to make graphics chips for video games.

Costco’s CEO Ron Vachris started in 1982 as a part-time forklift driver at Price Club, the warehouse chain Costco later merged with. He spent 40+ years working his way up to the top job.

Warren Buffett bought his first stock at age 11 — three shares of Cities Service preferred — and later called it a lesson in patience after he sold too early and watched it soar.

Warren Buffett still lives in the Omaha house he bought in 1958 for $31,500 — the same frugality behind his $100,000 CEO salary, unchanged for decades, which keeps nearly all of his wealth inside Berkshire stock rather than paid out to him.

Micron’s CEO Sanjay Mehrotra co-founded the flash-storage pioneer SanDisk in 1988 and ran it until its 2016 sale — then took over a rival memory maker, Micron, the next year.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy founded Amazon Web Services in 2003 and ran it for 18 years. The cloud business he built became Amazon’s profit engine — and his path to the top job.

AMD’s Lisa Su and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang — who run the two companies at the center of the AI-chip boom — are distant relatives, a fact both have publicly confirmed.

Lockheed Martin’s CEO James Taiclet was a U.S. Air Force pilot who flew in Operation Desert Shield, then spent 16 years running a wireless-tower company before taking over the defense giant.

AMD’s Lisa Su was born in Tainan, Taiwan, and moved to the United States as a child. She earned all three of her degrees — bachelor’s, master’s, and a PhD in electrical engineering — at MIT.

Jensen Huang immigrated from Taiwan as a boy and was sent to a strict boarding school in rural Kentucky, where he cleaned the dormitory toilets before class. He later co-founded NVIDIA.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella grew up in Hyderabad, India, and was a serious cricket player as a boy — he credits the sport with teaching him teamwork and leadership.

Google’s Sundar Pichai grew up in a two-room home in Chennai, India, with no television or car, sleeping in the living room with his younger brother. He now runs one of the most valuable companies on earth.

GM’s Mary Barra started at the company at 18 as a co-op student, inspecting fender panels to help pay for her engineering degree. Decades later she became the first woman to run a major global automaker.

Apple’s Tim Cook grew up in small-town Robertsdale, Alabama, the son of a shipyard worker and a pharmacy employee, and was salutatorian of his high school before studying industrial engineering at Auburn.

Tesla’s Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, taught himself to program as a child, and sold his first piece of software — a space game called Blastar — at age 12.

Salesforce’s Marc Benioff sold his first software as a teenager and became Oracle’s youngest vice president at 26, spending 13 years there before founding Salesforce in 1999.

Broadcom’s Hock Tan grew up in Penang, Malaysia, and won a scholarship to MIT, where he earned two engineering degrees before an MBA at Harvard — then became one of tech’s most aggressive dealmakers.

JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon is a third-generation banker — both his father and grandfather were stockbrokers — and he was fired from Citigroup in 1998 before rebuilding his career and taking over JPMorgan.

To lure PepsiCo president John Sculley to Apple in 1983, Steve Jobs asked him one question: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Sculley took the job.

Before Apple, Jobs took an Atari job to design the arcade game Breakout and brought in his friend Steve Wozniak, agreeing to split the pay. Wozniak built it in a few days; Jobs told him it paid $700 and handed him $350 — while reportedly keeping a bonus of around $5,000. Wozniak only learned the truth years later.

From his return in 1997 until his death in 2011, Steve Jobs drew a salary of exactly $1 a year from Apple — his fortune was in stock. The $1-salary move was later copied by Google’s founders and by Mark Zuckerberg.

Apple’s 1983 Lisa computer was officially said to stand for “Local Integrated Software Architecture.” Years later Jobs admitted the real story to his biographer: it was named after his daughter, Lisa.

When Apple opened the iTunes Music Store in 2003, the radical idea was letting people buy a single song for 99 cents instead of a whole album. The record labels resisted unbundling the album; Jobs talked them into it, and it reshaped the music business.

As Apple neared its one-millionth iMac in 1999, Jobs wanted to hide a golden certificate in one of the boxes, Willy Wonka style — the finder would win a refund and a personal tour of Apple, which Jobs planned to give dressed in a top hat and tails. Lawyers killed it, since sweepstakes law requires a no-purchase way to enter.

As a young Atari engineer in the mid-1970s, Jobs was convinced his all-fruit diet meant he didn’t need to bathe. His coworkers disagreed, and he was moved to the night shift — and to de-stress he would soak his bare feet in the office toilet.

For years Steve Jobs drove a silver Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG with no license plate. California gave newly bought cars a grace period before plates had to be displayed, so he reportedly leased an identical new one every six months and never had to show one.

Before the investor Ross Perot toured NeXT, Jobs reportedly told an engineer to hide their Porsches so Perot wouldn’t think the startup was awash in cash. It worked: in 1987 Perot put about $20 million into NeXT.

Jobs was diagnosed in 2003 with a rare, treatable form of pancreatic cancer — an islet-cell tumor, not the common aggressive kind. He delayed surgery for about nine months while trying diet and alternative remedies before having the operation in 2004, a wait he later told his biographer he regretted.

Bill Gates has a published mathematics paper. As a Harvard undergraduate he co-wrote “Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal” (1979) on the “pancake sorting” problem with professor Christos Papadimitriou — and the bound he proved stood as the best known for roughly 30 years.

One of Bill Gates’s own coding credits is DONKEY.BAS, a crude driving game he co-wrote in 1981 (with Neil Konzen) to ship with the first IBM PC. Apple’s Macintosh team later singled it out as an embarrassment.

As teenagers around 1970, Bill Gates and Paul Allen went dumpster-diving behind a Seattle computer company — Allen boosting the smaller Gates up to the bin — and pulled out a printout of the DEC operating system’s source code to learn how it worked.

Gates and three Lakeside classmates were banned for a summer from a local computer company after they were caught exploiting bugs to grab free machine time. The punishment became a deal: free computer time in exchange for hunting down the system’s bugs.

Handed the job of writing his high school’s class-scheduling program, Gates arranged his own schedule to land in classes with a disproportionate number of girls he found interesting — something he later admitted in a Lakeside commencement speech.

At Harvard in the mid-1970s, Gates was a fixture at all-night dorm poker games — winning and losing hundreds in a night and dropping thousands over one stretch. He has credited the game with teaching him to bluff and weigh risk.

In Microsoft’s early days Gates memorized his employees’ license plates so he could tell from the parking lot who was coming and going, and when. “Eventually I had to loosen up as the company got to a reasonable size,” he later admitted.

In Microsoft’s famous “BillG reviews,” Gates grilled teams on their plans so relentlessly that one staffer’s whole job in the meeting was to tally how many times he swore — a lower count meant it had gone well.

Even in 1990 — a wealthy, public Microsoft — Gates flew economy. Company policy was coach for everyone, and colleagues recall him working an entire New York flight from a middle seat.

Bill Gates got so hooked on Minesweeper, the little Windows puzzle game, that he uninstalled it from his own office PC to stop himself from playing.

A real 1977 police mugshot shows a grinning 22-year-old Bill Gates, taken in Albuquerque after a traffic stop. Paul Allen bailed him out.

Driving from Albuquerque to Seattle in 1979, Gates collected three speeding tickets — two of them from the same officer, who pulled him over twice on the same trip.

In a 1994 CBS interview, Connie Chung asked Bill Gates whether he could jump over a chair from a standing start. “It depends on the size of the chair,” he said — then did it, on camera.

Bill Gates became a billionaire in 1987 at age 31 — the youngest self-made billionaire in the world at the time. Microsoft’s March 1986 IPO had already made him worth roughly $350 million overnight. Mark Zuckerberg took the youngest-self-made-billionaire title from him in 2008, at age 23.

Bill Gates topped the Forbes list of the world’s richest people for most years between 1995 and 2017 — interrupted only by Warren Buffett in 2008 and by Carlos Slim from 2010 through 2013. Jeff Bezos didn’t overtake him until 2018.

One of the richest people alive does his own dishes every night. “Other people volunteer,” Gates said in a 2014 Reddit Q&A, “but I like the way I do it.”

Warren Buffett has led Berkshire Hathaway since 1970 — the longest tenure of any chief executive in our CEO$ database.

Warren Buffett has drawn the same $100,000 salary from Berkshire Hathaway for over 40 years — one of the lowest CEO salaries of any major company. His wealth is his stock, not his pay.

Mark Zuckerberg’s official salary at Meta is $1. Nearly all of his reported pay is the cost of personal security — not compensation in the usual sense.

Elon Musk’s salary in Tesla’s proxy is effectively $0. His entire pay is a contested, all-or-nothing option package tied to enormous market-cap milestones — not cash or ordinary stock.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong takes a $1 million salary and no new stock. Most of his reported pay — millions a year — is personal security and private-jet costs, not wealth.

Andy Jassy’s Amazon pay is often headlined at tens of millions, but the proxy’s Summary Compensation Table reports about $2 million — a $365,000 salary and security. The gap is the vesting value of a one-time 2021 stock grant.

The CEO-pay number you see in headlines is usually the grant-date value of stock awarded that year — not cash the executive banked. What actually vests can be far higher or lower.

Costco pays its CEO around a $1.2 million salary and total pay under $14 million — remarkably restrained for a company worth several hundred billion dollars.

At about $205 million, Broadcom’s Hock Tan booked one of the largest single-year CEO pay packages ever disclosed in an SEC proxy — nearly all of it a multi-year performance stock grant.

The highest-paid chief executive in our CEO$ database is Hock Tan of Broadcom, at $205.3 million in fiscal 2025 — every dollar of it from the company’s SEC proxy.

Not every CEO is overpaid: the lowest reported package in our CEO$ database is Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, at just $405,111 in fiscal 2024.

We track exact, filing-sourced pay for 50 chief executives in CEO$ — the Summary Compensation Table total for each, cited to the proxy, never a net-worth guess.

Hock Tan made more last year than the 15 lowest-paid chief executives in our CEO$ database combined — one $205.3 million package outweighing 15 others put together.

Half of the chief executives in our CEO$ database made more than $31.2 million last year, and half made less — a sense of the going rate for running a major public company.

The highest-paid chief executive we track earned about 507× what the lowest-paid one did — Hock Tan of Broadcom versus Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, both from their own SEC proxies.

The single largest stock grant among the chief executives we track went to Hock Tan of Broadcom: $202.4 million of equity in one year, vesting over time against performance targets.

26 of the legendary investors we track hold GOOGL in their latest 13F filings — more than any other stock in our whale watchlist.

AAPL is Berkshire Hathaway's largest disclosed stock position — about $57.84B of Warren Buffett's public portfolio in the 13F-HR for the quarter ended 2026-03-31.

The largest open-market insider buy we've logged in the past 45 days: about $279K of REI, purchased by a company insider.

2 different insiders at REI bought shares within the same 45d window — a cluster buy worth about $338K. Clustered insider buying is a pattern traders watch closely.

44 of the companies we track report earnings in the next two weeks — dates our engine projects from each company's own filing cadence, not paid analyst estimates.

Costco has sold its hot-dog-and-soda combo for $1.50 since 1985. A former CEO once said the price would stay $1.50 "forever" — and it has, even as inflation reshaped everything around it.

Amazon launched in 1994 as an online bookstore run out of a garage. Jeff Bezos reportedly chose books because they were a huge, standardized market easy to ship.

Berkshire Hathaway began as a failing textile maker. Warren Buffett later called buying it his "dumbest" investment — yet the name stuck to what became one of history’s greatest holding companies.

Apple became the first U.S. public company worth $1 trillion in 2018, then the first worth $3 trillion a few years later — milestones that once seemed impossible for any company.

Broadcom’s CEO Hock Tan can be paid over $200 million in a year he receives a multi-year stock grant — and a tenth of that in the off years. His pay is famously lumpy by design.

Oracle’s Safra Catz voluntarily zeroed out her own multi-million-dollar cash bonus one year, cutting her reported pay to about $1.1 million — tiny for a mega-cap CEO.

NVIDIA has had only one chief executive in its entire history — Jensen Huang has run the company since he co-founded it in 1993.

In more than 40 years, Costco has had only three CEOs: co-founder Jim Sinegal, Craig Jelinek, and — since 2024 — Ron Vachris, who started as a teenage forklift driver.

Coca-Cola has raised its dividend every single year since 1963 — more than 60 straight annual increases that put it in the small club of “Dividend Kings” that never cut through recessions, wars, or crashes.

Amazon went nearly a decade after its 1997 IPO without turning an annual profit — Wall Street doubted it for years — before finally posting one in 2003.

Berkshire Hathaway has never split its Class A shares. A single Class A share now costs more than a house — Warren Buffett kept it that way to attract long-term owners, not traders.

Microsoft paid no dividend for its first 17 years as a public company, finally starting one in 2003 — and it has paid, and raised, one every year since.

Coca-Cola has kept its formula a trade secret since 1886 and never patented it — because a patent would have forced the company to publish the recipe for all to see.

Johnson & Johnson has raised its dividend for more than 60 consecutive years — a “Dividend King” that has increased its payout through every recession since the 1960s.

Walmart has paid a dividend since 1974 and raised it every single year since — roughly half a century of consecutive increases.

Google’s 2004 IPO was unusual: it used a Dutch auction to let ordinary investors bid directly, deliberately bypassing Wall Street’s usual practice of allocating shares to insiders.

Amazon went public in 1997 at $18 a share, raising about $54 million. The company that Wall Street doubted for years is now worth well over a trillion dollars.

Facebook’s 2012 IPO raised about $16 billion — one of the largest in tech history — but the stock fell by roughly half within months before recovering and going on to multiply many times over.

As NVIDIA’s price kept climbing, it split its stock to keep shares affordable — a 4-for-1 split in 2021 and a 10-for-1 split in 2024, turning one pre-split share into 40.

Netflix launched in 1998 mailing DVDs to customers in red envelopes. It did not stream a single video until 2007 — a decade before it became a household word for online video.

Today’s Broadcom is really Avago: Hock Tan’s Avago Technologies bought the original Broadcom Corp in 2016 for $37 billion and kept the more famous name.

NVIDIA spent its first two decades making graphics chips for video games. The same parallel-computing hardware turned out to be ideal for AI — and today datacenters, not gamers, drive most of its revenue.

Amazon started selling only books in 1994. Today its cloud arm, AWS, generates the majority of the company’s operating profit — retail is the storefront, but the cloud is the engine.

Apple was reportedly months from bankruptcy in 1997 when Microsoft invested $150 million to keep its rival afloat. Two decades later, Apple became the first company worth $3 trillion.

Adobe used to sell Photoshop in a box for hundreds of dollars. In 2013 it killed boxed software entirely and moved to Creative Cloud subscriptions — one of the boldest SaaS pivots in tech.

AMD once owned its own chip factories. In 2009 it spun them off into GlobalFoundries and went “fabless,” betting everything on design — the bet that eventually let it challenge Intel.

Shopify began as Snowdevil, an online snowboard shop. Its founders couldn’t find e-commerce software they liked, so they built their own — and ended up selling the platform instead of the snowboards.

Microsoft was a Windows-and-Office company until Satya Nadella bet it on the cloud in 2014. Azure and cloud services now drive its growth far more than desktop software ever did.

Netflix has reinvented itself twice: from mailing DVDs, to streaming other studios’ shows, to producing its own hits — starting with House of Cards in 2013.

Tesla was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Elon Musk joined in 2004 as its largest early investor and chairman, later became CEO, and is now the company’s public face.

Every public company must file a proxy statement (Form DEF 14A) before its annual meeting. It’s where CEO pay, board elections, and shareholder votes are disclosed — the source behind CEO$.

When a corporate insider buys or sells their own company’s stock, they must report it to the SEC on Form 4 within two business days — which is why insider trades show up so quickly.

Big investors disclose their holdings on Form 13F only 45 days after each quarter ends — so the "whale" positions everyone watches are always at least six weeks stale.

Since 2018, U.S. companies have had to disclose the ratio of their CEO’s pay to the median employee’s — a Dodd-Frank rule. Some ratios run into the thousands to one.

When something material happens — a CEO resigns, a deal is signed, results are pre-announced — a company usually has just four business days to file an 8-K telling investors.

Before a company can go public it files an S-1 — a registration statement laying bare its finances, risks, and ownership. It’s the first time outsiders get a real look inside.

We track the quarterly 13F stock holdings of 64 legendary investors — Warren Buffett, Bill Ackman, Michael Burry, Ray Dalio, and Seth Klarman among them — straight from their SEC filings.

Members of Congress can legally trade individual stocks — but under the 2012 STOCK Act they must publicly disclose most trades within 45 days. That disclosure is what makes tracking them possible.

The penalty for a member of Congress filing a late stock-trade disclosure is often just a $200 fine — small enough that some pay it repeatedly rather than report on time.

In the 12 months ending 2026-07-09, members of Congress disclosed more trades in MSFT than in any other stock — 12 separate buy or sell disclosures under the STOCK Act.

Members of Congress disclosed buying HUBB 11 separate times in the 12 months ending 2026-07-09 — more than any other stock they reported purchasing.

About 3% of the congressional stock trades disclosed in the 12 months ending 2026-07-09 were filed late — past the STOCK Act's 45-day deadline. The penalty is often just a $200 fine.

Members of Congress disclosed an estimated $77 million of stock trades in the 12 months ending 2026-07-09 — a figure derived from the dollar ranges they're required to report.

We track 846 congressional stock-trade disclosures from 62 lawmakers — every one filed publicly under the STOCK Act, which lets anyone follow what Congress trades.

On Black Monday — October 19, 1987 — the Dow fell 22.6% in a single day, still its worst one-day percentage drop ever. No single piece of news fully explains it.

In the 2010 "Flash Crash," the U.S. stock market lost roughly a trillion dollars of value in minutes — then recovered most of it before the day was over.

Over the long run the S&P 500 has returned roughly 10% a year on average before inflation — but almost no individual year actually lands near 10%. The average hides wild swings.

In 2024 NVIDIA briefly became the most valuable public company in the world, overtaking Apple and Microsoft — driven almost entirely by demand for its AI chips.

Miss the market’s 10 best days over a couple of decades and your long-run return can be cut roughly in half — and those best days often cluster right next to the worst ones.

The stock market is more than 400 years old. In 1602 the Dutch East India Company began issuing tradable paper shares, creating the Amsterdam exchange — the world’s first modern stock market, and a direct ancestor of today’s Euronext.

Since 1928 the S&P 500 has finished the year higher about 73% of the time — roughly three years in four end in the green. Down years are impossible to predict in advance, but the base rate quietly favors staying invested.

The first great stock bubble burst three centuries ago. In 1720 shares of Britain’s South Sea Company shot from around £100 to nearly £1,000 in a matter of months, then collapsed back toward £100 by year-end — ruining thousands of investors.

The New York Stock Exchange began under a buttonwood tree. Twenty-four brokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement on Wall Street in 1792; the board that grew out of it was known as the New York Stock & Exchange Board until 1863, when it took the name it carries today.

One country dominates global investing. As of 2024–2025 the United States makes up about half of the world’s total stock-market value, and roughly 60% of the widely followed MSCI All-Country World Index — far more than any other nation.

Two calendar quirks have held up for decades. September has been the weakest month for U.S. stocks on average since 1950 — the only month with a consistently negative long-run return — while October is the most volatile, home to the crashes of 1929, 1987, and 2008.

The Dow spent the entire 1970s going almost nowhere. It closed 1969 at 800.36 and closed 1979 at 838.74 — a gain of just 38 points, in price terms, across ten full years.

Japanese stocks compounded at roughly 17% a year through the 1970s and nearly 29% a year through the 1980s — turning $10,000 in 1970 into about $610,000 by 1989. The bubble then burst so completely that the Nikkei 225 didn’t reclaim its December 1989 peak until February 2024, a 35-year round trip.

The only four-year losing streak in Dow history is the Great Depression: the index fell 17% in 1929, 34% in 1930, 53% in 1931, and 23% in 1932. 1931 remains the worst calendar year the Dow has ever recorded.

Warren Buffett is one of the greatest investors of all time — and for a moment he looked completely out of step. In the 20 months leading into the March 2000 dot-com peak, Berkshire Hathaway’s stock fell about 45% while the Nasdaq 100 nearly tripled. Buffett was right in the end; it just took longer than the market’s patience.

Most individual stocks are, over their full lifetime, a bad bet. A landmark study of nearly every US stock from 1926 to 2016 found that only about 43% ever beat the return of a one-month Treasury bill over their entire existence — and that the best-performing 4% of companies accounted for the market’s *entire* net wealth creation over that 90-year span.

The stock market doesn’t always track the economy. In 1908 — a recession year in which the earnings of Dow companies were roughly cut in half — the Dow itself rose about 46%.

In 1949 the US stock market traded at about 6.8 times earnings and paid a 7.5% dividend yield — a bargain-bin valuation born of Depression-era fear. Fifty years later, at the 2000 peak, it traded near 30 times earnings with a dividend yield of about 1%. Same market, same math, almost opposite psychology.

"Stocks always win in the long run" has a real exception on the books: from the spring of 1996 through March 2020 — 24 years — long-term US government bonds returned about 8.2% a year, edging out the S&P 500’s 8.0%, and did it with roughly a third less volatility.

The "safe" asset isn't always safe. From 1950 to 1981 — a long stretch of rising inflation and rising rates — long-term US government bonds lost more than half their value after adjusting for inflation, even though their stated (nominal) returns stayed positive the whole time.

Since the late 1920s, simply holding cash in short-term Treasury bills has beaten the US stock market in roughly one out of every three calendar years — even though stocks have compounded at nearly 10% a year over the full period, more than three times cash’s return.

US home prices, adjusted for inflation, went essentially nowhere for more than a century. Data compiled by economist Robert Shiller shows real home prices were flat from 1870 all the way to 1975 — the now-familiar idea of housing as a reliably appreciating asset is a much newer phenomenon than most people assume.

Gold’s most explosive run happened decades before anyone was talking about it as an inflation hedge on the internet: from 1970 through January 1980 it compounded at roughly 35% a year, a total gain of about 1,900%.

The market giveth and the market taketh away. US stocks returned roughly 3,000% in total from 1979 through 1999 — then gave back 28% of their value, in total, from 2000 through 2008.

$1 million invested in Enron or in Lehman Brothers common stock would be worth exactly $0 today. Both companies filed for bankruptcy — Enron in December 2001, Lehman in September 2008 — wiping out their shareholders completely.

The worst rolling 10-year total return the US stock market has ever produced is a loss of about 40%, for the decade starting at the September 1929 peak. The best rolling 10-year return is a gain of about 597% — roughly 21% a year — for the decade starting in the summer of 1949. Same market, ten-year holding period, wildly different outcomes depending only on when you started.

The 1970s (into 1980) and the 1930s were opposite extremes for the dollar. Cumulative inflation from 1970 to 1980 ran about 98% — a dollar from 1970 was worth roughly 50 cents by 1980. The 1930s ran the other way: prices fell a cumulative 19%, deflation that made a 1930 dollar worth about $1.23 by 1939.

The Dow closed at 381.17 on September 3, 1929, right before the crash. It did not close above that level again until November 23, 1954 — nearly 25 years later.

Since 1970, the Dow has closed higher on only about 52% of trading days — barely better than a coin flip on any given day. Nearly all of the index’s long-run gain comes from compounding a slight edge across tens of thousands of days, not from picking winning days.

Bernie Madoff’s clients believed they held about $65 billion — the number printed on their statements. Almost none of it was real: he ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history, and in 2009 was sentenced to 150 years in prison.

The Ponzi scheme is named for Charles Ponzi, who in 1920 promised investors a 50% profit in 45 days by trading international postal reply coupons. He was really paying earlier investors with later investors’ money — the same mechanism every Ponzi has used since.

When Enron collapsed into bankruptcy in December 2001, it took its auditor down with it: Arthur Andersen, one of the world’s five largest accounting firms, was convicted of obstruction and effectively ceased to exist — even though the Supreme Court later overturned the conviction.

WorldCom inflated its profits by roughly $11 billion by booking ordinary expenses as long-term investments — the largest accounting fraud in U.S. history at the time. Its 2002 collapse helped push Congress to pass the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; CEO Bernard Ebbers was sentenced to 25 years.

A single trader, Nick Leeson, hid £827 million in losses and destroyed Barings — Britain’s oldest merchant bank, founded in 1762. After the 1995 collapse, the 233-year-old institution was sold to ING for one pound.

Michael Milken built the junk-bond market of the 1980s, then pleaded guilty in 1990 to securities and tax felonies and paid $600 million in fines. He was banned from the securities industry for life — and pardoned by President Trump in 2020.

Arbitrageur Ivan Boesky paid a $100 million penalty in 1986 for insider trading — the largest ever at the time. Months earlier he had told a graduating class that “greed is healthy,” the line that inspired Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good.”

Long-Term Capital Management had two Nobel Prize-winning economists among its partners and still nearly brought down the financial system. When it blew up in 1998, the Federal Reserve organized a $3.6 billion rescue by 14 banks to unwind it without a panic.

In 2008 a single Société Générale trader, Jérôme Kerviel, ran up €4.9 billion in losses on unauthorized positions — the largest rogue-trader loss on record at the time. A court later slashed the damages he personally owed, faulting the bank’s own risk controls.

Tyco’s CEO Dennis Kozlowski was convicted in 2005 of looting more than $600 million from the company. The spending that made him infamous: a $6,000 shower curtain and a $2 million birthday party in Sardinia, half of it billed to Tyco.

Wirecard was a member of Germany’s blue-chip DAX index when it admitted in 2020 that €1.9 billion of cash on its books simply did not exist. The company collapsed within days, and its chief operating officer fled and remains a fugitive.

Bre-X claimed to have found one of the largest gold deposits ever, deep in the Indonesian jungle, and was briefly worth about $6 billion. The core samples had been salted with gold dust; as the fraud unraveled in 1997, the project’s chief geologist fell to his death from a helicopter.

On a single morning in 2012, a botched software update caused Knight Capital’s systems to fire millions of unintended orders into the market. The firm lost about $440 million in roughly 45 minutes — nearly wiping out one of the largest traders in U.S. stocks.

Allen Stanford sold billions in certificates of deposit promising safe, above-market returns — all backed by a $7 billion Ponzi scheme. In 2012 he was sentenced to 110 years in prison.

For a few days in October 2008, Volkswagen was the most valuable company in the world. Porsche had quietly cornered the stock — controlling about 74% through shares and options — and when short sellers scrambled to cover with almost no float left, VW briefly spiked to around €1,005 a share.

Crazy Eddie was a New York electronics chain famous for its “his prices are insane” ads, and one of the era’s boldest accounting frauds. After going public in 1984, the Antar family inflated inventory to prop up the stock and cashed out more than $90 million before the company collapsed into bankruptcy in 1989.

Through the summer of 2020, big-tech stocks kept ripping higher and few could say why — until the Financial Times unmasked the “Nasdaq whale.” SoftBank had reportedly bought about $4 billion of call options on tech stocks, a bet with reported notional exposure near $30 billion.

In 2000 the SEC charged Jonathan Lebed, a 15-year-old from New Jersey, with stock manipulation — the first minor it had ever gone after. From his bedroom he bought thinly traded stocks, hyped them with repeated posts on message boards, and sold into the spike; he settled by giving back $285,000 and was allowed to keep the rest.

In January 2021, retail traders organizing on Reddit turned GameStop into the ultimate short squeeze. More than 140% of the stock’s float had been sold short; as the crowd bought, the price ran from under $20 to an intraday high of $483, and hedge fund Melvin Capital needed a $2.75 billion rescue after its bet against the stock collapsed.

Barry Minkow took his carpet-cleaning company ZZZZ Best public at age 21, one of the youngest founders ever to do so. Most of the business was fictional — a fake insurance-restoration division — and it collapsed in 1987, costing investors and lenders around $100 million.

“In the short run the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.” — Benjamin Graham

“Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” — Warren Buffett

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” — Warren Buffett

“The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.” — Warren Buffett

“The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting.” — Charlie Munger

“Know what you own, and know why you own it.” — Peter Lynch

“The four most dangerous words in investing are: "this time it’s different."” — Sir John Templeton

“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” — Warren Buffett

Wall Street’s "Charging Bull" statue was never commissioned. Artist Arturo Di Modica trucked it in and dropped it outside the NYSE overnight in 1989 as guerrilla art; the city kept it after crowds loved it.

The term "blue chip stock" comes from poker, where the blue chips traditionally carried the highest value at the table.

Markets are "bull" or "bear" after how each animal attacks: a bull thrusts its horns up, a bear swipes its paws down — mirroring prices rising and falling.

The ticker-tape parade got its name from actual stock tickers: office workers threw the used paper tape from stock-price machines out their windows to celebrate.

U.S. stocks were priced in fractions until 2001. For two centuries a share might trade at 50 1/8, and the smallest possible move was an eighth of a dollar — a habit inherited from the Spanish “pieces of eight.” The NYSE only switched to decimals and penny increments in January 2001.

The oldest book about the stock market was written in 1688. “Confusion of Confusions,” by Joseph de la Vega, described the Amsterdam exchange — short-selling, speculation, and panic — in terms a trader today would still recognize.

In 1954 the economist Armen Alchian worked out which fuel powered the U.S. hydrogen bomb — by watching the stock market. Noticing that Lithium Corp of America’s shares had jumped about 461% that year, he deduced the secret was lithium. The government ordered his paper destroyed.

In 1999 a chimpanzee named Raven picked stocks by throwing darts at a list of 133 internet companies. Her “MonkeyDex” portfolio returned 213% that year — ranking her the 22nd best-performing money manager in the U.S. and beating thousands of professional brokers, before the dot-com crash wiped the gains out.

The "Super Bowl Indicator" claims that when a team from the old NFL wins, stocks rise that year, and when an old-AFL team wins, they fall. It ran hot through the 1980s and 90s, hitting roughly 70-80% accuracy — then cooled to a coin flip once people started paying attention. It’s become a textbook example of spurious correlation, not an actual signal.

A Japanese day trader named Takashi Kotegawa, trading under the alias "BNF," turned about $13,000 into more than $150 million over roughly eight years. His single biggest day came in 2005, when a broker's "fat-finger" error at Mizuho Securities flooded the market with erroneous sell orders — Kotegawa bought into the chaos and made an estimated $20 million before the day was over.