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

Introduction to the Previous Edition

Did you know that price/earnings ratios were higher in early 1987 than in 1929? Or that in 1929 stocks collapsed at the same time all around the world? Or that double-digit interest rates dominated the 19th century? Do you care? Should you care? If you can't answer those questions, then do you really know what makes Wall Street waltz?

Maybe it will help if you consider that Arizona produced only 870,408 eggs in 1880, but its chickens laid fully 13,572,852 of them 10 years later. Doesn't help, huh? That little tidbit came from The Abstract of the Eleventh Census: 1890, which sits on my firm's library shelves along with lots of other obscure tomes stuffed with facts that nobody in his or her right mind would attempt to catalog. Lennie, our head trader, was mildly amused, but only mildly, when I blurted out those statistics—but then she came from Arizona.

Most of us couldn't care less. Every day we are so bombarded with “facts” that we haven't time to assimilate what's shoved at us, much less go out of our way to understand financial history and how it might relate to our lives. Most folks don't want to get a Ph.D. in finance or economic history. They just want to learn enough of the Wall Street Waltz so that they can comfortably profit from the human race's second most awkward dance, without making fools of themselves on the waltz floor.

Most folks are afraid of the Wall Street Waltz. You might be—and probably should be, because most investors ...