Word: stockings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...atmosphere of near panic that gripped insiders at the height of the investigation has subsided, but the probe seems to be having lasting effects. Surveys have shown a definite slowdown in the trading of stock of major corporate takeover targets immediately before the announcement of merger bids...
...more bewildering development is the array of complex, computer-assisted trading techniques that, in taking the stock exchanges by storm, have become a major cause of the market's extraordinary peaks and valleys. The most controversial is known as program trading, in which computers, for example, launch massive buy and sell orders for stocks and stock-index futures simultaneously (see following story...
Undeniably, individual investors, who still own $1.95 trillion in equities, or two-thirds of all U.S. stock, have been getting rid of their holdings at a swift clip. In 1985 U.S. households sold $122 billion more in stock than they bought, a record. This year the net sales are projected to reach $105 billion...
...this does not necessarily mean that individuals are getting out of the stock market entirely. Instead, increasing numbers of Americans are returning as institutional investors themselves, in the form of shareholders in mutual funds. Nearly half of the 47 million U.S. households that own stock now do so through mutuals. In the past two years alone, the number of mutual-fund shareholders increased by 2.7 million. Says James Van Horne, a professor of finance at the Stanford University Business School: "Individuals increasingly are becoming indirect stock owners." One of them is Bill Blankemeier, 31, a regional sales manager...
There is considerable irony in the retreat by individuals. Virtually all of the stock market's current volatility has been made possible by computers. And these in turn were originally installed at New York's Big Board to offer easier, cheaper trading to tempt back small investors who had begun to flee to bonds and money-market accounts during the high-inflation '70s. In all, the Big Board spent $200 million on its modernization during the past five years. When the stock market perked up again starting in the early 1980s, the major institutional investors quickly spotted the advantages...