The Crash Of ’87 Remembered: “It Was Clear The Acapulco Cliff-Dive Was On For Monday”
“The markets in a panic are like a country during a coup, and seen in retrospect that is how they were that day,” wrote a young Salomon bond salesmena named Michael Lewis, of the chaos he witnessed. “One small group of people with its old, established way of looking at the world is hustled from its seat of power.”
As Bloomberg details, most of the people willing to share their memories count themselves as winners who seized the moment as an opportunity not only to make money, but also to insert themselves in the new financial order – Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Their story, and the story of Black Monday, is the birth story of modern financial markets – a wild ride of shock, angst, and, for some, glory.
In the weeks before Black Monday, a few investors spotted patterns that gave them pause.
he most confident were Paul Tudor Jones and Peter Borish, young partners at a small hedge fund in Lower Manhattan. In a prescient Sept. 24 note to investors, Jones even signed off with “caveat emptor” – buyer beware.
PETER BORISH, head of research at Tudor Investment Corp. and Paul Tudor Jones’s No. 2:
We were tracking exponential moves in the equity market. The main one was the equity move in the 1920s, and the market in 1987 looked almost identical. The week before Black Monday, the technical and fundamentals aligned, and so we thought Monday would be the day.
ALLAN ROGERS, head of government bond trading at Bankers Trust Co.:
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