Value investing · Course 22 of 39 · The practice
Market history for investors
1929, 1973-74, 1987, 2000, 2008 and 2020: what happened, what the figures were, and what each taught a value investor.
For a reader who wants the great crashes and bear markets as dated figures rather than stories: 1929, 1973-74, 1987, the dot-com years, 2008 and 2020, each with the S&P 500's annual return as printed in Berkshire Hathaway's 2025 annual report; 1929 predates the table.
After it you can set a fall against the ones already on record, tell a one-day event apart from a multi-year one, and say what borrowed money and a good story had to do with most episodes on the list.
It assumes The value investor's mindset, for the margin of safety a falling price tests, and the valuation courses, for the multiple that a story-driven price usually gets wrong first. One lesson draws on Industries that need their own ratios, for reading a bank's balance sheet rather than its income statement.
The method, not the running of it
Market history for investors is 7 lessons on running the whole method on one company. Running it is the part that only happens against real filings, on a real date, and this course has none of yours. It also cannot tell you the day one of your reasons stops being true, which is the part that matters after you have bought.
Related
- The value investor's mindset sets out the margin of safety and second-level thinking every episode in this course tests against a real price.
- Industries that need their own ratios supplies the bank-reading skill the 2008 lesson leans on.
- CAGR calculator computes the rate between any two points on the wealth line this course builds.
See our methodology for how the product reads a filing and what it refuses to compute.