BusinessWeek Declared Stocks Dead. The Greatest Bull Run in History Disagreed.

In 1979, inflation was running hot and stocks had been garbage for a decade. BusinessWeek decided this was the perfect moment to publish their infamous cover story—complete with a stock certificate folded into a crashing paper airplane—declaring that equities were finished. The article urged readers to abandon stocks entirely and pivot to bonds, real estate, or (and I quote) diamonds.

Three years later, the market bottomed. Then it did something inconvenient for BusinessWeek's thesis: it exploded upward into one of the greatest bull runs in financial history.

The S&P 500 on publication day: 107.42 points. The S&P 500 forty years later: 2,882.44 points.

That's a 2,700% increase. Meanwhile, inflation only tripled. Investors who followed the advice and fled to diamonds are presumably still waiting for their gemstones to outperform.

The lesson? Peak pessimism is often the best time to buy—and magazine covers are contrarian indicators.