This week in 1958: LIFE Magazine highlights a strange new phenomenon: The public is investing in the stock market as never before. “On the average,” reports LIFE, “500,000 new customers a year have been getting into the market and 8.6 million Americans now own some kind of common or preferred stock…. To an extent which our founding fathers could never have foreseen, we live today under a genuine people’s capitalism, in which the stock market has become everybody’s business.” The Dow Jones Industrial Average is around 500, but a “prominent market observer” (probably choosing to remain anonymous because his forecast sounds so crazy) predicts that “Just inflation alone will some day carry the Dow-Jones average over 1,000.” Imagine that.
Via Jason Zweig’s This Day in Financial History
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