Global Financial Data has added extensive price data from regional stock exchanges to its U.S. Stocks Database. GFD now has the most extensive historical data on regional US Stock Exchanges available anywhere in the world. We have combined numerous sources to provide continuous monthly data from all the major historical regional stock exchanges in the United States up to 1972 when the NASDAQ came into existence. Data from the regional exchanges covers not only smaller, local companies that listed exclusively on a regional exchange, but also many companies that listed on a regional exchange as a first step before moving to the New York Stock Exchange or New York Curb/American Stock Exchange. Companies that listed on the regional exchanges included not only local manufacturing companies, but local banks, utilities, resource and transportation companies. Monthly price data are now available in the US Stocks Database for the following exchanges:

• Baltimore –1803-1862, 1878-1949. In 1949, the Baltimore Stock Exchange merged into the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and ceased to exist.
• Boston—1789-1972. Boston was one of the premier stock exchanges up until World War I. Many New England manufacturing companies listed exclusively on the Boston SE.
• Chicago—1889-1949. Chicago provided listings for many local companies which went on to list on the New York Stock Exchange and New York Curb and was one of the largest exchanges in the US before World War II. The Chicago SE merged with several other stock exchanges in 1949 to form the Midwest Stock Exchange.
• Cincinnati—1912-1941. This was one of the smaller, regional exchanges.
• Cleveland—1912-1949. The Cleveland Stock Exchange merged into the Midwest Stock Exchange in 1949.
• Detroit—1926-1972. Many companies related to the auto industry listed on the Detroit SE.
• Los Angeles—1924-1956. Many local oil and mining companies listed on the Los Angeles SE. It merged into the Pacific Stock Exchange in 1956.
• Midwest Stock Exchange—1949-1972. This was the successor to the Chicago, Cleveland, New Orleans and St. Louis Stock Exchanges.
• New Orleans Stock Exchange—1810-1858, 1912-1931. This was a small, regional exchange that merged into the Midwest Stock Exchange in 1949.
• Pacific Stock Exchange—1956-1972. This was the successor to the Los Angeles and San Francisco Stock Exchanges. The exchange was acquired by Archipelago in 2005.
• Philadelphia Stock Exchange—1786-1850, 1878-1972. In the early 1800s, the Philadelphia SE was larger than the New York SE. Along with the New York and Boston SE, it remained one of the premier exchanges in the United States throughout the 1800s. It absorbed the Baltimore SE in 1949, the Washington SE in 1954 and the Pittsburgh SE in 1970.
• Pittsburgh Stock Exchange—1908-1970. A small regional exchange with many companies in the steel industry. It merged into the Philadelphia SE in 1970.
• San Francisco Stock Exchange—1905-1956. The San Francisco SE provided data on many local utility, oil and mining companies, and merged into the Pacific SE in 1956.
• St. Louis Stock Exchange—1912-1941. The St. Louis SE listed a number of apparel companies and merged into the Midwest SE in 1949.
• Washington Stock Exchange—1900-1931. This is a smaller regional exchange which merged into the Philadelphia SE in 1954.

If you would like more information on the United States Stock Database, please feel free to contact one of our sales representatives.

  Confederate bonds are now prized by collectors of Confederate memorabilia. Since the bonds were never redeemed, thousands of these remnants of the South still exist for anyone to own. One of the more interesting bonds produced by the Confederacy were the Erlanger bonds which were issued in London in an attempt to raise much needed foreign currency for the Confederacy. These bonds were authorized by an Act of the Confederacy on January 29, 1863, and were the only bonds issued in foreign markets by the Confederacy. One of the more interesting aspects of these bonds is that they were Cotton Loan Bonds, backed by and redeemable in bales of cotton. The reason for issuing Cotton Loan Bonds was that anyone who bought Confederate bonds faced the risk of default if the Confederacy lost the war. Even if the Confederate States were to survive the war, the Confederacy lacked the gold reserves requisite to back the bonds. However, the South had plenty of cotton, a commodity that was essential to the mills in England and the rest of Europe. The Cotton Loan Bonds which were backed by bales of Confederate “white gold” at a price that would provide a profit to potential buyers if the bonds were paid off in kind rather than in cash. The £100 bonds (about $485 in gold before the war) were redeemable for 8 bales (4000 pounds) of cotton. Additional bonds were issued at £250, £500 and £1000. The bonds paid 7% interest and were redeemable in 20 years. The Erlanger bonds traded on both the London and the Amsterdam Stock Exchanges. The performance of the bonds reflected traders’ faith in the Confederacy. Declines in the value of the bonds occurred as the war turned against the Confederacy, and it became more evident that the Confederacy would lose the war and be unable to redeem the bonds. A similar indicator of faith in the Confederacy is reflected in the gold premium for the Confederate Dollar. At the beginning of the war, one paper Confederate Dollar was redeemable for one dollar in gold, but as the war progressed, the premium on gold rose. As you can see in the graph below, the Confederate Dollar depreciated consistently against gold during the war. Initially, this decline was due to inflation in the Confederacy since it was funding the war primarily through paper money and through issuing bonds. Toward the end of the war, the risk of default drove the rise in the gold premium. The conversion rate for “bluebacks” as the Confederate currency was known, rose from 1.2 Confederate Dollars to a Gold Dollar at the beginning of 1862 to 3.25 at the beginning of 1863, 20 at the beginning of 1864, and 60 at the beginning of 1865. By April 1, 1865, just a week before the peace treaty was signed at Appomattox, the rate was at 70. After the South surrendered, the rate quickly collapsed, hitting 1500 by May 1, 1865. This can be seen in the graph below. Confederate Bonds became Zombie Bonds. Though officially dead, speculators continued to keep them alive. Since British and French courts felt that the United States government was responsible for Confederate liabilities, despite the Fourteenth Amendment, speculators in London continued to buy the 7% Erlanger Cotton Bonds. As the graph below illustrates, the price of the bonds collapsed in 1865, and fluctuated between £3 and £8 pounds from 1865 until 1871 when the bonds stopped trading on the London Stock Exchange. Thereafter, the bonds were usually quoted around £1, except between 1879 and 1884.   Two hoards of Erlanger Cotton bonds remained in London after the war. Between 1879 and 1884, some bond holders felt that a new effort to wrest money from the Federal Government might succeed. Speculators began buying the bonds at 2% of their value, causing bonds to flow into London from the former Confederate states. When these bonds dried up, Dutch counterfeits were produced to meet the demand. A committee was formed to make the case for the bondholders, but to no avail. By 1885, the efforts had come to nothing, and most of the bonds were returned to their owners. Some bonds remained unclaimed and these bonds settled in the vault of Coutts Bank. This hoard was sold in 1987 for over £350,000. The zombies had finally come back to life a century later. Another hoard of bonds lay in the vaults of Erlanger Bank. This included about one-third of the bonds that had originally been issued, but not sold. In addition to this, in 1863, the Erlanger Bank had bought up some of the bonds in an effort to support their price. The bonds remained in the bank’s vault for the next 100 years, surviving even the Nazi bombing of London during World War II. In 1966, Douglas Ball, one of the experts on Confederate bonds, visited Mr. Leo Erlanger concerning the bonds in the bank’s vault. The bank had been sold in 1964, and Erlanger was winding down the bank’s operations. Douglas Ball, who was researching confederate bonds in preparation for his dissertation, wanted to know how many of the bonds were left. When Mr. Erlanger said they still had the bonds, Douglas Ball let him know that he could probably make Erlanger over $100,000 by slowly releasing the bonds onto the collector’s market.

 

Which country has the dubious distinction of suffering the worst bear market in history?

To answer this question, we ignore countries where the government closed down the stock exchange, leaving investors with nothing, as occurred in Russia in 1917 or Eastern European countries after World War II. We focus on stock markets that continued to operate during their equity-destroying disaster. There is a lot of competition in this category. Almost every major country has had a bear market in which share prices have dropped over 80%, and some countries have had drops of over 90%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 89% between 1929 and 1932, the Greek Stock market fell 92.5% between 1999 and 2012, and adjusted for inflation, Germany’s stock market fell over 97% between 1918 and 1922. The only consolation to investors is that the maximum loss on their investment is 100%, and one country almost achieved that dubious distinction. Cyprus holds the record for the worst bear market of all time in which investors have lost over 99% of their investment! Remember, this loss isn’t for one stock, but for all the shares listed on the stock exchange. The Cyprus Stock Exchange All Share Index hit a high of 11443 on November 29, 1999, fell to 938 by October 25, 2004, a 91.8% drop. The index then rallied back to 5518 by October 31, 2007 before dropping to 691 on March 6, 2009. Another rally ensued to October 20, 2009 when the index hit 2100, but collapsed from there to 91 on October 24, 2013. The chart below makes any roller-coaster ride look boring by comparison. Since Germany and other paymasters for Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece were tired of pouring money down the bail-out drain, they demanded not only the usual austerity and reforms to put the country on the right track, but they also imposed demands on the depositors of the banks that had created the crisis, creating a “bail-in”. As a result of the bail-in, debt holders and uninsured depositors had to absorb bank losses. Although some deposits were converted into equity, given the decline in the stock market, this provided little consolation. Banks were closed for two weeks and capital controls were imposed upon Cyprus. Not only did depositors who had money in banks beyond the insured limit lose money, but depositors who had money in banks were restricted from withdrawing their funds. The impact on the economy has been devastating. GDP has declined by 12%, and unemployment has gone from 4% to 17%. On the positive side, when Cyprus finally does bounce back, large profits could be made by investors and speculators. The Cyprus SE All-Share Index is up 50% so far in 2014, and could move up further. Of course, there is no guarantee that the October 2013 will be the final low in the island’s fourteen-year bear market. To coin a phrase, Cyprus is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to invest there.

  One of the long-term components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been IBM. The company was originally added to the Dow Jones Industrials on March 26, 1932 in a reshuffle involving eight stocks including Coca-Cola, Nash Motors (later American Motors) and Proctor & Gamble. On March 13, 1939, however, both IBM and Nash Motors were removed from the average and replaced by American Telephone & Telegraph and United Aircraft Corp. (now United Technologies). AT&T was in the Dow Jones Utilities Average until June 1, 1938. Until then, the Dow committee had interpreted utilities in a broader sense to include electric, gas, and communications companies as providers of essential services. In 1938, the Dow Jones committee decided to restrict membership in the Utilities Average to power utilities. The resulting reshuffle removed nine stocks, including AT&T, International Telephone & Telegraph, and Western Union, all of which were communications utilities rather than power utilities, from the Dow Jones Utilities Average. Since AT&T was such a huge company, it was moved over to the Dow Jones Industrial Average which required that another stock be removed to make room for AT&T. Thus, IBM was kicked out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. What if the Dow Jones committee had not redefined the Utilities Average to only include power utilities? What if IBM had stayed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average between March 13, 1939 when it was removed and June 29, 1979 when IBM replaced Chrysler in the Dow Jones Industrials? Obviously, the Dow Jones Industrials would be higher than it is today, but how much higher? International Business Machines incorporated on June 16, 1911 as The Computer-Tabulating-Recording Co., a merger of The Computing Scale Company of America, The Tabulating Machine Company and The International Time Recording Company of New York. The company listed on the NYSE in November 1915, and on February 14, 1924, the company acquired International Business Machines and changed its name in a reverse acquisition. IBM has been one of the best performers on the stock exchange in history. If you had invested $1 in IBM when it started trading OTC in August 1911, it would have grown to $40,000 today on a price basis. If you had reinvested your dividends, your $1 investment would have grown to $1,434,300. In the past 100 years, IBM has given over a million-fold return. The graph below shows the performance of IBM stock over the past 100 years. So what if the Dow Jones Committee had kept IBM in the Dow Jones Average between March 1939 and June 1979 and had never admitted AT&T, keeping it in the Utilities Average? What would the result have been? IBM closed at 187.25 on March 14, 1939 while AT&T closed at 166.125. IBM closed at 73.375 on June 29, 1979 while AT&T closed at 57.875. Price wise, the results appear to be similar. The difference is that both stocks split, and the stocks had several rights offerings in the intervening 40 years. The cumulative effect of these stock splits and rights offerings is significant. You would have to adjust the stock price of AT&T by 7.15 to allow for the impact of stock splits and rights offerings, but you would have to adjust IBM stock by a factor of 562.48. If neither stock had split or provided rights offerings in those intervening forty years, AT&T stock would have been at 414 in June 1979, but IBM would have been at 41,272. IBM increased one hundred times more than AT&T during those intervening forty years.   The DJIA is currently trading above 16,000. If you add 22,740 points to this value, you would arrive at a DJIA close to 39,000. If IBM had stayed in the DJIA, CNBC and The Wall Street Journal would be preparing for the DJIA’s approaching rendezvous with 40,000. However, since the Dow Jones Committee removed IBM from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1939 and kept it out for forty years, we will have to wait several more decades to reach that goal.