Fourteen Fun Facts about the Stock Market
Time for some more fun facts about financial topics! Today, we’re going to check out some fun facts about the stock market and its history.
So, as always, did you know these fun facts?
1. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is what many economists use to measure the financial health of the United States. General Electric is the only company that is still on there that was on there when it was developed in 1896.
2. The New York Stock Exchange is probably the most well known stock exchange in the world, but did you know it’s not the oldest in the US? The Philadelphia Stock Exchange was created two years earlier in 1790.
3. The lowest trading day was early on in the stock market’s life, at 31 shares in 1830. That seems like a really rough day, considering there hasn’t been a day since 1953 that less than a million shares have been traded. And, since 1997, never less than 1 billion.
4. February 27, 2007 was the largest trading day ever; over 4 billion shares were traded that day.
5. The economy doesn’t ever truly stop; why should the stock market? Well, in 1914,
6. Remember the Stock Market crash of 1929 that ended up causing the Great Depression? Three of the five largest percentage drops in the stock market happened that year; the other two were in 1987 and 1899.
7. After the Great Depression it took 25 years for the stock market to recover fully, to the point it’d been at before the crash.
8. The system that the New York Stock Exchange uses is seats. Until 2005, membership had to be bought. Before the change, the highest price ever paid for a seat was 4 million dollars. The bad news? It was 30 days before it switched to a licensing system.
9. The first woman to have a seat was Muriel Siebert in 1967.
10. The oldest stock certificate was found in the Netherlands by a graduate student working on his thesis.
11. Ticker tape was first used by the NYSE in 1867.
12. In 1989, the Wabash Railroad had no technical employees, and had stock on the NYSE. How did they have any stock? They owned some track between Buffalo and Omaha that they leased out to people.
13. Some companies are really creative with their stock symbols. For example…
o BOOT – Lacrosse Footwear
o GRRR – Lion Country Safari
o BABY – Natus Medical Company
o CASH – First Midwest Financial
o READ – American Learning Foundation
o EARS – Hearx Ltd.
o FOTO – Seattle Filmworks
14. Bonds come in different sizes and denominations. The smallest is Louisana’s “Baby Bond”, which is $5 in cost and the size of a standard index card (3 inches x 5 inches). The picture on it? A baby, of course.
Before looking at these things, I didn’t know some of them either, so I hope enjoyed learning them as much as I have!
