Who I Am and Why I’m Here
October 19, 1987. Black Monday. I was newly-hired 26 year old, sitting in an office full of people who were supposed to know what they were doing.
The Dow dropped 22.6% in a single day. The single largest one-day percentage decline in market history — before or since. And I watched, in real time, as the people who were paid to see it coming said absolutely nothing useful. Not before. Not during. Not after.
What I remember most isn’t the numbers on the screen. It’s the silence. Smart people, credentialed people, people with offices and titles and years of experience — frozen. Because the map they’d been handed didn’t match the territory they were standing in.
That day taught me something I’ve never forgotten: knowledge can be learned in a classroom but experience comes from being in the room when things go sideways.
I’ve been in a lot of rooms since then.
So. What Is This?
The Ward on the Street is a newsletter about markets and the economic forces that actually shape your financial life — written by someone who has spent nearly four decades in and around finance and investments, lived through every major market event since Black Monday, and has precisely zero interest in telling you what you want to hear.
This is not a tips newsletter. I won’t tell you what to buy or when to sell. That’s not what I do, and frankly it’s not what you need.
What I will do is give you something harder to find: perspective from someone who has seen this movie before. Not the sanitized version. The real one — with the parts where the experts are wrong, where the consensus narrative falls apart, and where the people who stay calm and think clearly come out ahead of the people who followed the crowd.
Who This Is For
If you’re 50 or older, sensibility-wise or chronologically, and you’re tired of getting your market commentary from someone who wasn’t born yet when the S&L crisis happened — this is for you.
If you’ve noticed that most financial media oscillates between panic and cheerleading with very little in between — this is for you.
If you want to understand what’s actually happening in markets, not just what’s trending on financial Twitter — this is for you.
If you want hot takes and meme stocks, there are ten thousand other places to go. No hard feelings.
Free
It’s free to subscribe.
One Last Thing
I spent most of my career inside institutions — watching how financial decisions actually get made, how egos shape (and distort) markets, and how the gap between what experts say publicly and what they think privately is wider than most people realize.
Let’s see what we can figure out together.
— Ward
If this was interesting to you, please forward it to a friend who also pays attention to the markets.
