On this day, October 15, 2008, the DJIA dropped 733 points.

[A HERETIC I AM]

3. I remember Ford going lower than that.

Seems to me it got down to $0.53 at one point. There was the general feeling that all of the US auto makers were going to go belly up. The main difference for Ford was they weren’t as deep in the finance end of the business as GM was (Remember GMAC?)

I was a broker during those days, and I remember one morning before the open, the DJIA futures went “Limit Down” which was just unprecedented.

I also remember a day there was a 2000 point swing. It fell a thousand points within a short time after the opening bell and regained it all back during the rest of the day, closing within a few hundred points of the open.

Those were some incredible days to be watching it, to be sure.

In retrospect, here was just about the perfect play, selling stocks and buying bonds;

Say you had a $100,000 equity portfolio in September of 2007. If you had sold it all at or near the peak of the market and bought 30 year treasuries, you could have gotten that paper with a 5% coupon for around 92% of par if I remember correctly.

Hold those bonds till December of 2008 and the same ones you paid $920 a piece for were now worth $1300 a piece, PLUS you were paid $50 in interest per bond for holding them. That would have made you about $35K in profit.

Then turn around and bought Ford for anything near the level below $2, held those for 3 years and sold for $20 .

That would have resulted in a gain of close to $1.5 million, depending on when exactly you made the trades.