'The Death of Equities' BusinessWeek's August 1979 cover is probably the most famous example of the Magazine Cover Indicator. "The death of equities looks like an almost permanent condition," it opined in the inside pages. Far from retiring to the graveyard, equities reached for the heavens.
The following 20 years saw stocks rise by 1,400 per cent in the biggest bull market of the 20th century. Lazarus himself would have been impressed.
'Can anyone save HP?'Hewlett Packard spent years in the doldrums before much-maligned chief executive Carly Fiorini was finally pushed out in February 2005.
BusinessWeek's somewhat hysterical question was answered with an unequivocal Yes by the stock market, with the share price doubling over the following 12 months as HP reclaimed its position as the world's number one manufacturer of personal computers.
'The Angry Market'Corporate scandals. Plummeting dot-com shares. War in Afghanistan, impending war in Iraq. Things were ugly in summer 2002. In fact, they'd been ugly for over two years and BusinessWeek's belated recognition occurred just as the turnaround was in sight.
'The Great Telecom Crash'The Economist's July 2002 cover was a lament for the once high-flying telecom stocks. However, within days of publication, that sector bottomed out.
'Will you ever be able to retire?' Hot on the heels of the above-mentioned covers came Timemagazine's graphic cover of an elderly woman serving teenagers at a drive-through window. Time's question almost exactly mirrored the bottom in the S&P 500 and a new bull market was about to begin.
'Land of the Setting Sun?'"The world has been waiting 10 years for a new dawn in Japan. It's getting easier to imagine that it might never happen."
BusinessWeek's gloomy assessment of Japanese woes came a full 12 years into a savage bear market that had decimated Japanese equities. By then, the end was in sight and the Nikkei has more than doubled since bottoming in early 2003.
'Amazon's Jeff Bezos - Person of the Year 1999 - Timemagazine Talk about timing. Within a year, Amazon shares had lost 85 per cent of their value as the dot-com bubble burst in spectacular fashion.
'Drowning in Oil'Another classic contrarian signal, the Economist's famous 1999 cover was at the tail end of a decade-long bear market in oil which saw prices hit single digits. "Consumers everywhere will rejoice at the prospect of cheap, plentiful oil for the foreseeable future . . . $10 might be too optimistic. We may be heading for $5."
Not quite. Opec cut production within a week, prices rose by 30 per cent and a multi-year bull market that saw prices multiply seven-fold was under way.
