InsiderFlow › Guides › The Most Famous Market Bubbles in History
Every generation swears "this time is different". Every time, the script repeats: euphoria, leverage, denial, crash. Knowing past bubbles is the best vaccine.
The textbook case: at the peak, a single rare bulb was worth as much as a house on Amsterdam's canals. The market collapsed within weeks, leaving financial history's first great warning.
The South Sea Company mania swept all of England. Among the victims: Isaac Newton, who lost a fortune and reportedly remarked: "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people".
Mass leveraged speculation (stocks bought on 10% margin), new-era euphoria, then the crash: -89% for the Dow Jones and the Great Depression. The SEC and modern market rules were born from it.
A ".com" in the name was enough to double a stock. The Nasdaq lost 78% in two years; yet from those ashes emerged Amazon and Google: the technology was real, the prices weren't.
Prices detached from every metric, widespread leverage, mass participation by first-time investors, and the refrain "this time is different". Nobody predicts the exact moment of the burst, but the symptoms are always the same — and data on real flows (what big funds do, not what social media says) helps separate substance from euphoria.