It wasn't on a par with V.J. Day, the Kennedy assassination or O.J.'s white Bronco chase, but a lot of people will remember where they were and what they were doing at 7:50 a.m. (MDT) Tuesday, March 16.
That was the moment when the Dow Jones industrial average hit the 10,000 mark for the first time, a remarkable milestone considering that it took 88 years for it to reach 1,000 in 1972 and only 27 years to make the leap to 10K.The floor of the New York Stock Exchange was the epicenter of the action Tuesday, but since the Dow stayed in five-figure territory for less than a minute, the cheering didn't last very long.
The Dow closed Tuesday at 9,930.47, down 28.30 points for the day. In mid-morning trading Wednesday, it was down 41.35 at 9,889.12.
But at financial offices everywhere, brokers paused to savor a moment that few veterans of past bear markets ever thought they'd see in their lifetime.
"We heard the roar on CNBC (television), and people came out of their offices here to celebrate, but it was over pretty quickly," said Sterling Jenson, president and chief executive officer of First Security Investment Management Inc. in Salt Lake City.
"It makes a good script for those in the movie business, but I don't know that it has any real significance because, while they are all large companies, the Dow is still just 30 stocks."
Not long ago, the Dow hitting some major milestone was fodder for the business pages but hardly a subject for TV coverage. On Tuesday, it made the front page of the Deseret News and was the main water cooler topic in offices everywhere, replacing basketball scores as the hot topic.
The Dow, the S&P 500, the Russell 1,000 and other key financial scores are now tracked not just by brokers, economists and CEOs but by virtually everyone.
Jan Holman, vice president of investment services at American Express Financial Services, terms it the "democratization" of investing.
"Over the last 27 years, there has been a people's revolution when it comes to investing," said Holman. "People have poured their money into the stock market in ways that, for most of this century, would have been impossible to imagine."
Average people, she said, have found that they need new ways to save and invest, and the stock market has been their answer.
Will it also be their undoing? For every stock market bull today, there are at least two bears, growling that the market is out of control and that "plain folks" are going to regret becoming investors rather than savers. The markets, they contend, have gone too far too fast and are heading for a serious fall.
Trouble is, they've been saying that since the Dow hit 5,000, notes First Security's Jenson. Those who listened to the naysayers and fled to the safe harbor of money funds and bank CDs missed out on one of the biggest bull markets of the 20th century.
"They (the bears) are comparing this to history, but if past market moves were a pure indicator of what will happen in the future, then the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans would be made up of librarians," said Jenson.
"The fact is, we've never had growth of this magnitude with inflation so low. There's no historical precedent, so it appears we really are in a new era."
Jenson predicts the Dow will hit 10,500 by the end of the year.