Monday, October 12, 2026
I don’t know who said it, but I love this quote: “There are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen.”
I love it because it focuses on how quickly meaningful moments unfold.
For instance, on Oct.19, 1987, the market fell 23% in a single day.
In September 2008, the unraveling took two weeks. Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in history. The very next day, the government rescued insurance giant AIG.
In 2020, the whole market cycle compressed into a single month. The market hit an all-time high in February. Then 33 days later, it dropped 34%.
The biggest drawdown years all had euphoria before the destruction, as if the good times would roll on forever.
At the height of the dot-com bubble, the whole country went nuts over the internet (like AI now). Companies with nothing – no profits, revenue, or even products – soared.
Pets.com bought a Super Bowl ad. It was gone within a year.
Webvan raised a fortune to deliver groceries. Its public offering valued the company at $4.8 billion. In 2001, it was out of business.
Semiconductor company Qualcomm rose more than 2,000% in a single year. It then fell for three years straight.
In all cases, euphoria eventually meets reality. Those who think the rules don’t apply find out that they do, sometimes harshly.
Take 2026, for example (seems we’ll be talking about it for a long time).
On the surface, things look great. The economy is growing, inflation is cooling, and incomes are rising.
But underneath that calm, massive forces are grinding against one another. Euphoria is prevalent. Some think the rules don’t apply – valuations are meaningless, AI will change everything, and so on.
Thus, some stocks can only go up. But history happens again and again.
Daniel A. White is an investment advisory representative of and provides advisory services through CoreCap Advisors, LLC. Daniel A. White & Associates and CoreCap Advisors are separate and unaffiliated entities.