Bollinger On Bollinger Bands

John Bollinger, CFA, CMT

My first encounter with the stock market came as a child in the form of a bequest of a few shares of Fruhauf, a company that subsequently took a long time to go bankrupt. My second encounter came as a young man, in the late 1960s, while working for the Museum of the Media, an institution owned by three brothers whose father was a highly successful underwriter of high-tech stocks at the time. High-tech stocks were all the rage, and my supervisor fell under the influence. Without really understanding the details, I instinctively knew something wasn’t quite right. Next came the mid-1970s and an assessment of the damage done to my mother by holding mutual funds through a bear market. My final formative acquaintance came in the late 1970s when oil was “on its inevitable way to $50 or $100 barrel” and oil stocks were all the rage, especially small companies involved in deep drilling for gas in places like Oklahoma’s Anadarko basin. Needless to say, oil

went down instead of up, and oil stocks in general were crushed, with many of the marginal stocks disappearing altogether.