The Greatest Wall Street Comic of All-Time

One of my favorite parts about writing over the years is the regular feedback I get from readers.

People send me questions, ideas, charts, movie recommendations, books, old magazines and the occasional grammar/spell check.¹

A reader recently shared with me that he’s been collecting Wall Street comics for a few decades. He wanted to send me the entire collection, clipped straight from newspapers and financial publications over the years.

I’m a sucker for a good finance comic so I was happy to sift through the whole pile and pick out some of my favorites to share.

The 1990s comics had two main focal points — tech stocks and Alan Greenspan.

I know there are a lot of comparisons right now between AI and the dot-com bubble the 1990s feel like they were in a different stratosphere:

When talking about my book a number of people asked me if we could ever see another Great Depression-like calamity in the stock market, which was down more than 80%.

You don’t have to go back that far to see this level of pain in tech stocks. The aftermath of the dot-com bubble was brutal.

The Nasdaq Composite was down nearly 80%. The Nasdaq 100 crashed more than 82%. That’s a Great Depression-like crash in tech stocks not all that long ago.

When the Nasdaq dropped almost 40% in 2000, the Dow was down just 6%. In 2001, the Nasdaq dropped more than 20% while the Dow fell 7%.

Investors did have a place to hide out in the more boring dividend-paying blue chips:

Alan Greenspan made his now famous irrational exuberance speech in 1996. The dot-com bubble was just getting warmed up at that point.

Greenspan was a larger-than-life figure in the markets back then.

Here’s a good one on the bubble <a href="https://comicvibe.com/5-best-indie-games-of-all-time-ranked/” title=”5 Best Indie Games Of All Time, Ranked”>times:

Greenspan was a financial celebrity of sorts back then. Investors hung on his every word:

They even covered Greenspan on the B.C. comic strip:

This is one of my all-time favorites about the negativity bias in the financial media:

That one came out in 2008 but could easily be used today.

There are not many bull market cartoons. There are a lot of good bear market comics.

This one is funny because it’s true!

Also true.

This is a good soft landing crossover with a bear market:

There were also a series of comics about how hard it is to predict the markets:

This one had to come from the likes of Barron’s:

Markets can twist your brain into a pretzel at times.

This one sounds like something I would say:

I’m glad this one was in the collection because it’s the greatest Wall Street comic of all-time:

It’s perfect.

As the kids like to say — no notes.

Further Reading:
“The market is rolling simply because it’s rolling”

¹I was surprised how much of this stuff still gets by the AI grammar police.