Too bad it was only a weekly (Friday night) show, because things had calmed down considerably by the time of the post-crash episode.
I was attending the Naval Postgraduate School when this happened, along with about 500 other peers of my age & income. Aside from college, it was the only duty station where everyone was about the same demographic.
On Tuesday the 20th, the campus was a ghost town. More of our fellow students were showing up by Friday and explaining what they'd been doing. It turned out that a few people had been licking their wounds (and wondering what to do next) while most of the rest were frantically scrabbling behind sofa cushions for more money to buy shares on sale. This was back in the day when "buying shares" meant that you had to wire funds to your brokerage and then spend the entire day literally "dialing for dollars" to place your buy orders, getting constant busy signals and long hold queues, and paying hundred of dollars in commissions. One courageous guy even talked about using something called "margin" and taking out a second mortgage on his home.
A (very) few were skeptical and buying gold. After all, the market had been going up almost constantly for five years. It was supposed to crash again any day now, and then it'd return to its "normal" behavior of 1966-1982. Because, after all, bull markets never last that long. You could look at the charts and see exactly what was about to happen. Everybody knew that stocks were dead.
A couple of nuts (mostly financial-management majors who couldn't handle engineering) were buying shares of a hot new stock called Micro-Soft. We computer engineering guys had been working with one of their products called "Windows 1.0", and it was a freakin' disaster. We were hot stuff with our Silicon Graphics machines, and when we couldn't get time on one of those then we time-shared on our department's VMS VAX. Who could beat that horsepower?!? But Apple IIs were great, everyone was saving up to buy a Mac, and they were a lot more fun than those loser IBM PCs.
Good times, good times.
In early November my spouse and I cashed in all our CDs and other oddball investments (like birthday-present EE bonds and Israeli bonds) and plunked it all into Fidelity equity mutual funds (with a 2% sales charge). That paid off very nicely, and we kept DCA'ing for the next 14 years.
