by Gary Alexander
November 11, 2025
Today is an important national holiday, honoring our veterans. The stock market is open, but the bond market is closed today. As it turns out, November 11 is a multi-faceted birthday in American history:
First of all, our nation was philosophically founded on this date 405-years ago. On November 11, 1620, the Mayflower set anchor in what is now Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. On that day, the Mayflower Compact was drafted and signed by 41-Pilgrims (mostly Puritan Separatists, who traveled to America to escape the jurisdiction of the Church of England). The Mayflower Compact was later hailed as the origin of the key democratic institutions that evolved in English-speaking America.
The Mayflower Compact pledged to “enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission….”
In military history, yesterday marked the 250th birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps. On November 10, 1775, the Continental Congress passed a resolution in Philadelphia chartering “two Battalions of Marines” for service as landing forces for the U.S. naval fleet. After the Navy and Marines went out of active duty for 15 years after the Revolution, Congress created a permanent U.S. Marine Corps in 1798.
Here are three key November 10 or 11 events that fell long before Armistice Day in 1918:
We’ve seen several important market events on this date, with some happening long before World War I:
On November 11, 1872, a raging fire engulfed Boston, which sent the New York stock market into a tailspin. Since so many key businesses were located in Boston, the fire cast a pall over Wall Street.
In the Great Depression, there were two great buying opportunities during this week in 1929 and 1932. First, the Dow reached its 1929 low on November 13 after a 48% decline in just 10-weeks. From that low, the Dow gained back 48% to recoup more than half its losses before tight Fed policies sank stocks again.
“On Monday, November 11 [1929], came another drastic slump. For the next two days, trading was heavy – the Exchange was still on short hours – and prices went down still more. In these three days, November 11, 12 and 13, the Times industrials lost another 50-points. Of all the days of the crash, these without doubt were the dreariest. Organized support had failed…Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or for jumping” (J.K. Galbraith, “The Great Crash, 1929”).
“By November 13, when bottom for the year was reached at last, of the eighty billion dollars that stocks listed on the Exchange had been worth in September, thirty billion was gone” (John Brooks, “Once in Golconda”).
Three-years later, in the week ending November 11, 1932, the Dow rose 10.6% on euphoria over the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who carried 41 of 48-states. He won 472-59 in electoral votes, with 57.5% of the popular vote, vs. 39.7% for incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover, and 2.8% for five minor candidates. Amidst all this euphoria, on November 11, 1932, NBC opened its new studios at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, where the chorus sang Happy Days Are Here Again in the grand opening that night. That day, the Dow index was on its way up from 41.22 in the week after FDR was nominated (July 8, 1932) to 194.4 on March 10, 1937, shortly after his second Inaugural, a 372% rise in the 1930s!
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
Half a century later, in the 1980s, the market staged some other quite notable rallies during this week.
The End of the Cold War Supercharged Markets on This Date in 1989
First, on November 11, 1985, all three major indexes of that time – the Dow Jones Industrials, the New York Stock Exchange composite and the S&P 500 – all reached record highs on this Veterans Day.
The next summer, a few free market economists and I led a group of high school students to Russia in August 1986, viewing the beginning of Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). Students from Russia and America shared their ideas, cautiously at first, but I could see the thaw coming.
By late 1989, Gorbachev’s policies and Reagan’s hard line led to the resignation of Erich Honecker, East Germany’s brutal Communist ruler. Then, East German commissars opened its border to West Germany.
Then came what could arguably be the most important event in the last half-century – not on 9/11, but on 11/9: On November 9-10, 1989, the 28-mile-long (and 28-year long) Berlin Wall, the most chilling emblem of the 44-year Cold War, became a pile of rubble in one night. All night long, East and West Germans celebrated their new freedom, as they walked freely across that once deadly dividing line.
The next morning, East German troops began dismantling all of the remaining Wall. East and West Germany soon united. Between mid-November and Christmas 1989, each Eastern European Soviet satellite collapsed, like…like dominoes, as Reagan, Gorbachev and the Pope helped nudge the dominoes.
The market, of course, loved this surprise event, rising 22 points the next day (Friday, November 10). More importantly, over the next decade, two key indexes quadrupled, and NASDAQ rose almost 800%.
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
In a notable coincidence, while the Communists’ world-famous Wall was crumbling, Capitalism’s biggest Window flew open: On the same day that the Berlin Wall fell, the first version of Microsoft Word Perfect 5.1 was shipped. Six-years earlier, on November 10, 1983, Microsoft announced its first graphical user interface, called Windows 1.0, which would allow users to multitask. Microsoft was one of only a few companies racing to develop a graphical interface for the IBM PC. The global Internet soon followed.
The Origin of Veterans (and Remembrance) Day…and Why It Still Matters
On November 11, 1918, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, World War I finally ended.
At first, it was thought to be “The War to End All Wars,” although it didn’t quite work out that way, but November 11 became a memorable day for veterans, especially in the first five or six years after the war:
- On November 11, 1920, the grave of an “Unknown Warrior” was brought from France and buried with a plaque in the west end of the nave at Westminster Abbey. The Americans and French soon followed Britain’s lead:
- On November 11, 1921, President Harding dedicated a Tomb for an Unknown Soldier in Arlington.
- On November 11, 1923, an Eternal flame was lit for Unknown Soldiers at the Arc de Triumph, Paris.
On the same day in Germany, inflation and political turmoil were reaching a boiling point. In the early morning hours of November 11, 1923, Bavarian leaders recanted their earlier (coerced) support of Hitler and ordered a rapid suppression of the Nazis. At dawn, government troops surrounded the main Nazi force occupying the War Ministry building. A desperate Hitler responded by leading a last-ditch march to the center of Munich. Near the War Ministry building, 3,000 Nazi marchers faced just 100-armed police.
Shots exploded, leaving 16-Nazis and three-policemen dead. Nazi leader Hermann Goering was shot in the groin, and Hitler suffered a dislocated elbow, but he managed to escape. Three days later, Hitler was arrested and sent to Landesberg prison, where he spent nine-months writing Mein Kampf. In his twisted mind, November 11 became the date of Germany’s “stab in the back” surrender, ending World War I.
Just eight years later, on November 12, 1933, 92% of Germans chose Hitler as Germany’s Chancellor, with 96% voter turnout. This mass voter delusion led five years later to Kristallnacht. On November 9-10, 1938 (the same night the Berlin Wall fell 51 years later), Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass) was the first large, organized nationwide violence against Jews. On this night and the next day, windows were smashed in all Jewish neighborhoods. Thousands of books (and Torah scrolls) were burned. Nazi troops and their sympathizers destroyed and looted 7,500 Jewish businesses, burned 267 synagogues, killed 91 Jews, and rounded up over 25,000 Jewish men, who were later sent to concentration camps.
The date for Kristallnacht was likely selected by Hitler in revenge for the 20th anniversary of the Armistice date in 1918, and the 15th anniversary of his failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.
In America, Veterans Day comes just a day after the birthday of the Marine Corps, and they are linked:
- On November 10, 1954, the Iwo Jima (Marine) Memorial was dedicated in Arlington, Virginia, and President Eisenhower signed a bill that changed the name of Armistice Day to Veterans Day.
- On November 10, 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, DC.
And in another irony, on November 10, 1970, Communist China first opened its Great Wall to Western tourists, so two major walls were liberated on the same date, China’s Great Wall and the Berlin Wall.
Yes, studying history can be both fun and profitable.
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