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14 Spectacularly Wrong Predictions

Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market is a book written by James Glassman and Kevin Hassett. Published in 1999, it is an unmistakable product of a time when a bursting dot-com bubble was unimaginable, and irrational exuberance was contagious. The book’s premise was that the boom times would cause the Dow Jones Industrial Average to rise to 36,000 within just a few years, and it offered advice on how best to cash in on this eventuality.

The book’s introduction states: “If you are worried about missing the market's big move upward, you will discover that it is not too late. Stocks are now in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground–to the neighborhood of 36,000 on the Dow Jones Industrial Average." Sadly, it didn’t exactly work out this way. Today, a used paperback copy of the now out-of-print book can be purchased on Amazon for as little as one cent,at the time of this writing.