Were it not for the stock market crash of the early 1970’s, James Stack might still be a mechanical engineer in Colorado.
Stack graduated at the top of his engineering class at Montana State University in 1974 and went on to work as a project manager at IBM. Taking the advice of economists and Wall Street analysts, he invested his retirement savings in the “Nifty Fifty” – 50 large-cap, mostly blue-chip stocks that were considered good bets at the time. But that conventional wisdom was wrong, and Nifty Fifty components lost as much as 90% of their value in the downturn that began in 1973.