The Wall Street Waltz: 90 Visual Perspectives, Illustrated Lessons From Financial Cycles and Trends, Revised and Updated Edition

Chart 37

190 Years of Stock Market Movements

By itself, this chart may be of less interest than when combined with other charts in this book or elsewhere, but any student of the market should be familiar with it. It pinpoints the market's major advances and declines from 1790 through 1980. It comes from Cycles magazine, published by the Foundation for the Study of Cycles.

What this chart does best is tell you when the market was going up and down, and which were the biggest moves. You can see long periods, such as 1880 through 1910, when stocks moved very little in any direction. If you can believe this chart, stocks rose only 2.3 percent per year during that period. On the other hand, Kondratieff wave freaks (see Chart 84) like to point to the three giant bull markets that occurred during the 1830s, 1870s, 1920s areas. They see them as speculative superbull markets, which come at a particular stage of the ultralong, 55-year economic waves they envision. Many of these observers envision that we are at just such a stage now. But their three superbulls weren't the only big advances. As shown in Chart 34, the 1840–1853 period is perhaps the most unheralded major bull market of all time. And, of course, the post-World War II advance dwarfed all others.

Notice my words, “if you can believe this chart.” I don't. Because of numerous other accounts that confirm when stocks were rising and falling, we can be fairly confident of this chart's accuracy as to when stocks were rising and falling. ...