Frank Newman: October crashes

“October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.” (Mark Twain.)

It's thirty years since the 1987 sharemarket crash - Monday the 19th of October 1987 (US time) to be precise. Wall Street had its biggest one-day fall in the history of the stock exchange, down 22 percent.

Brian Gaynor: No reason to go back to the bad old days

Rodney Hide, the former MP and leader of the Act party, says “we need the wild west back in New Zealand’s capital markets”.

He believes the wild west NZ sharemarket of the 1980s was not “a bad thing. It wasn’t. It was a time of the greatest and best transformation of business and organisation in the country’s history. It was possible then. It’s not now.”