Once in a generation or so, investors take leave of their senses.

They are gripped by a mania. Greed overwhelms fear until the music stops and those emotions are dramatically reversed.

For anyone who lives through such a period, this shapes their attitude to investing and, in extreme cases such as the Great Depression, their entire world view.

My formative period in the markets was the dotcom bubble and bust in the years either side of the millennium. 

My apprenticeship was enhanced by the fact that I worked at the time with Jim Slater, a financier who bore the scars of a previous moment of madness in the early 1970s.

I think we are in the early days of the final, frothy stage of a bull market which has been running for 16 years, not far short of the 18-year bull that ended in 2000.

Tom Stevenson Telegraph 18 September 2025 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/09/18/a-stock-market-crash-may-be-just-around-the-corner/

RE: My formative period in the markets was 1970s Nixonian stagflation

“Stagflation” remains a word not uttered in the polite company of the financial world.

The reason that markets haven’t jumped yet is that the last great inflation and correction happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s, just long enough ago that most adults in the financial markets don’t remember it 

Stagflation

https://www.internetional.se/toft/stagflation.htm

“Dad, what’s a financial crisis?”

One of Jamie Dimon’s daughters called him up from school with a question more than a decade ago: “Dad, what’s a financial crisis?” 

The billionaire who runs JPMorgan Chase & Co. tried to put her at ease. “It’s the type of thing that happens every five to seven years,” he told her, he later testified to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. 

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/05/dad-whats-financial-crisis.html