In the weekend leading up to a dreary Monday in October 1987, Paul Tudor Jones was presented with a rather curious chart that looked something like this:

Sitting bolt upright, he went for the jugular and shorted the guts out of the market using futures and made history.

This is well documented in Schwager’s New Market Wizards, Mallaby’s More Money Than God and the PBS documentary, Trader. What is less clear is whether this really was the only deciding factor in his mind, and that is something that will probably accompany Jones to his grave (or locker, if you are the nautical sort).

A little later (actually, a couple of decades later) Jones’ analyst admitted that the chart had been manipulated and stretched to make the 1929 precrash situation line up more closely with the 1987 precrash situation. Which also begs the question what else the analyst was looking ...