Studying market history does not give you tomorrow's price. But patterns in why prices move do repeat, and four forces explain almost every large move of the last century: policy, war, technology, and crowd psychology.

A few pivots worth memorizing

Looking back at prices is a weird mix of "this has happened before" and "this time might actually be different." These are a handful of scenes that moved into the textbooks.

• 1971 — End of gold convertibility. The U.S. dollar fully detaches from gold, becoming purely fiat.
• 1973, 1979 — Oil shocks. Crude jumps from ~$3 per barrel to $12, then to the $30s, detonating inflation.
• 1987 — Black Monday. U.S. equities drop ~22% in a single session; a birthplace for systemic-risk debate.
• 2000 — Dot-com bust. Nasdaq drops nearly 80% from its peak over ~5 years.
• 2008 — Global financial crisis. Subprime → Lehman → a zero-rate era.
• 2020–2021 — Pandemic liquidity. Asset prices surge on coordinated global stimulus.
• 2022–2024 — Inflation and hikes. The strongest inflation and rate cycle in ~40 years.

How to read market history honestly

The most dangerous habit when reviewing history is hindsight bias — imagining that events were obviously predictable. 2008, 2020, 2022 all looked reasonable in many directions at the time. Your sense of "I would have seen it coming" is usually memory editing itself.

What this guide links out to

"Market history" is huge, so we break it down per asset and per event. The articles linked below are each roughly 10–15 minutes of reading, focused on a single story.