It was October 29, 1929, the day the New York Stock Exchange crashed as stocks lost 13% of their value. It is generally recognized that the Black Tuesday heralded the beginning of the Great Depression. Three million shares changed hands that day that traders didn’t have time to record them all. Trades happened so quickly that although investors realized they were losing money, they didn’t know how much. Brokers call in margins and if stockholders couldn’t pay up, their stocks were sold, wiping out many an investor’s life savings in an instant. By all accounts, there was a selling panic. By November 13, 1929, the market had fallen to 199. By the time the crash was completed in 1932, following an unprecedentedly large economic depression, stocks had lost nearly 90 percent of their value.

That day when the market closed at 3 p.m., more than 16.4 million shares had changed hands, using 15,000 miles of ticker tape paper. The Dow had dropped another 12%. In total, USD 25 billion- some USD 319 billion in today’s dollar- was lost in the 1929 crash. Stocks continued to fall over subsequent weeks, finally bottoming out on November 13, 1929. The market recovered for a few months and then slid again, gliding swiftly and steadily with the rest of the country into the Great Depression. Companies incurred huge layoffs, unemployment skyrocketed, wages plummeted and the economy went into a tailspin. While World War II helped pull the country out of a Depression by the early 1940s, the stock market wouldn’t recover to its pre-crash numbers until 1954.