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This Friday marks 25 years since the attacks of 9/11.
It’s almost hard to believe.
That was a day we will never forget.
That’s become the 9/11 slogan, and the further we’re removed from it, almost a cliché.
But we say it to honor the victims of that horrible tragedy.
We say it to celebrate the bravery of the first responders.
And we say it to learn from history… remembering the past helps us navigate the future.
I’ll never forget that day for as long as I live, not only because the attacks, but because that day set in motion a trading mindset that’s stayed with me my entire career.
25 years ago I was early in my career, acting as a new options trading guru and play tactician.
Back then I was working for the Taipan group with a chart-reading wizard named Adam Lass. Adam and I worked extremely well together. He provided forward-looking chart predictions, and I used them to formulate options strategies that I recommended to my readers based on where we believed the major market indices were headed.
In September of 2001, Adam spotted an ominous candlestick pattern, which I used to recommend put options on the Nasdaq 100 (NDX).
The next day, the planes hit the towers.
Like so many of us, I remember clear as day the emotions that ran through my head that terrifying Tuesday morning.
My first thought was, “oh my lord, we’re under attack.”
My second thought, immediately after, was that the markets are going to get slaughtered and we’re holding NDX puts.
You know what happened next: The world watched in horror as the towers fell.
The Nasdaq canceled trading. The New York Stock Exchange was evacuated, along with nearly every bank and financial institution on Wall Street and in cities across the country.
Markets stayed shut for four trading days, the longest continuous closure since the Great Depression in 1933.
The London Stock Exchange and other exchanges around the world also closed and evacuated in case of follow-up attacks.
To get the market open again, the SEC invoked its emergency powers under Section 12(k) of the Securities Exchange Act for the first time in its history.
The NYSE reopened on Monday, September 17th, 2001.
An hour before the bell, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by half a point.
On the floor they held two minutes of silence. Members of the New York City police and fire departments came onto the floor, the entire room sang God Bless America, and those officers and firefighters rang the opening bell alongside the dignitaries.
Then the selling started.
The Dow dropped 684 points, or 7.1%, to close at 8,920, which was the largest single-day point decline in history at the time. The Nasdaq fell 115 points to 1,579.
Across the entire first week, the S&P 500 lost 11.6% and the Nasdaq lost 16.1%, with roughly $1.4 trillion in market value erased.
It was also the highest-volume day the NYSE had ever seen up to that point.
Warren Buffett had gone on 60 Minutes before the reopening and said he would not sell a single share of anything he owned.
We’ll always remember where we were that day. What we were doing. Who we called first. How the coffee tasted different afterwards…
But speaking for myself, and for the subscribers who were following my trades at the time, there are some letters that stick with me like glue.
Because while nearly everyone else was suffering heavy losses as the markets got decimated, my readers used their NDX puts to insulate themselves from most of what they were carrying elsewhere.
The letters of thanks, appreciation, and gratitude I received for making that protective put recommendation, just before those fateful events, still sit with me. It helped many of my early readers avoid the worst of the drawdown.
In many ways, that’s the moment I truly arrived as a trade tactician. Out of the ashes of that tragedy came the framework of a protective method that’s stuck with me ever since.
And here’s one of the most important takeaways.
Despite the steep and sizeable drop, the broader market showed remarkable resilience.
The market bottomed on September 21st, four sessions after the reopening. From there it turned, and the Dow reclaimed its September 10th level by late October, roughly six weeks after the attacks.
Goldman Sachs, looking back on it, described the markets as returning to pre-attack levels within a month.
Think about that for a second. The worst attack on American soil in modern history, the longest market closure since 1933, and inside six weeks the Dow was back where it started.
That sort of market recovery set in motion something I’ll be debuting next week.
It’s called the “Profit Launch Sequence,” which uses a unique trigger that tracks consecutive down-days to predict the precise moment that a bounce/turnaround will happen.
Unlike most of my other strategies, this one is specifically designed as a swing-trade method, which takes around 7-days to play out.
