This content is available through Read Online (Free) program, which relies on page scans. In 1963, Benoît Mandelbrot proposed that instead of following a strict random walk, stock price variations executed a Lévy flight.25 A Lévy flight is a random walk which is occasionally disrupted by large movements. The market continued to decline in value, leaving investors who had purchased stock on credit financially destroyed. This did little more than temporarily stem the tide, however, because from Black Thursday to October 29, 1929 ( Black Tuesday ), stocks still lost more than $26 billion of value and more than 30 million shares traded. When word spread that banks’ assets contained huge uncollectable loans and almost worthless stock certificates, depositors rushed to withdraw their savings.
When this was inevitably followed by a 12.8{606b15cb8282e5ec3580d0e72c193589ece6551be175750a8e347f0d91362e12} drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the stock market indices created by the editor of the Wall Street Journal, people started madly selling their stock, jamming phone lines and other communication systems.
Generally speaking, crashes usually occur under the following conditionscitation needed: a prolonged period of rising stock prices and excessive economic optimism, a market where Price to Earnings ratios exceed long-term averages, and extensive use of margin debt and leverage by market participants.
In the event of a disaster or bad news, especially on a global scale, when those sellers panic and sellout on a mass scale, stock prices plummet! In the aftermath of the stock market crash, the economy was further hurt by the tightening of the monetary policy by the Federal Reserve. From June 25th, 1929 onward it almost triples compared to a similar increase before stock splitting was introduced. Honeywell was removed from the Dow because the role of industrial companies in the U.S. stock market in the recent years had declined and Honeywell had the smallest sales and profits among the participants in the Dow. By 1933, unemployment had soared to 25 percent, up from just 3.2 percent in 1929.
The market was in an upward trend in the 1920’s and investments in shares were on the increase. This phase can be recognized by the saturation of the stock market and the increasing competition. As with many market reversals, the causes are numerous, intertwined, and controversial.