Market Backstory
Research and product direction: Manish Sharma, CFA, MCO Capital Partners LLC. Research, editorial and implementation assistance: Codex. Earlier engineering and source-capture assistance: WorkBuddy.
Charts, interfaces, explanatory diagrams and editorial interpretations are prepared for this edition. Historical excerpts are identified as excerpts and linked to their original publishers. Colored ticker badges are typographic identifiers, not issuer logos. None of the named issuers, researchers or agencies endorses this publication.
Fund and company price records
These price observations are supplied under a separate data licence. The publication owner confirms permission for public charts and browser-delivered data, with supplier identity omitted under the applicable attribution agreement. The public institutions credited below supply their own economic, policy and reporting datasets; they are not the source of these price histories.
Native price fields, adjustment basis, observation dates and transformations remain identified beside each figure. Full supplier provenance is retained privately. Our permission does not grant readers a separate redistribution licence.
The economic and policy setting
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: CPI-U, payroll employment, unemployment and earnings records. Seasonal adjustment, units, frequency and gaps follow the selected series.
- U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis: retained annual GDP observations and published units.
- U.S. Department of the Treasury: nominal and real Treasury yield estimates. Missing captured periods remain absent.
- U.S. Energy Information Administration: the retained daily Brent and WTI spot-price series, each with its own source definition.
- Federal Reserve Board, U.S. Government Publishing Office, Treasury and the Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State: selected official statements, speeches, historical documents and retrospective accounts. Original text and our interpretation remain distinct.
- Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation: selected institution-failure records. Institutional events do not reconstruct former shareholders' investment outcomes.
Changes: selected observations, unit formatting, explicitly described derived measures, charts and explanatory summaries. Public-agency provenance does not automatically clear third-party material embedded in an agency source.
Five older Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis / FRED context entries remain separately identified. FRED acquisition is paused; these are not permission to publish held index, CBOE or ICE series. WTISPLC is the St. Louis Fed's specific splice, not generic unrestricted oil data.
Company filings and dated portfolios
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR system and the reporting issuers and funds supply reported fiscal facts, filing events, share contexts and two dated N-PORT portfolio records. Company business-history notes also link to the original Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco and Home Depot reports and announcements.
Changes: factual field selection and presentation, stated interval eligibility and reported-versus-derived labeling. CIK, accession, fiscal interval, filing date and portfolio date retain their distinct meanings. No complete four-company quarterly panel, continuous share-count series or equity-sector holdings archive is claimed. Protected expression and bulk identifier reference lists are not licensed by this acknowledgment.
A century of annual research
Jordà–Schularick–Taylor Macrohistory Database, Release 6, consulted October 11, 2026.
- Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick and Alan M. Taylor (2017). Macrofinancial History and the New Business Cycle Facts. NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2016, volume 31, edited by Martin Eichenbaum and Jonathan A. Parker. University of Chicago Press.
- Òscar Jordà, Katharina Knoll, Dmitry Kuvshinov, Moritz Schularick and Alan M. Taylor (2019). The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015. Quarterly Journal of Economics 134(3), 1225–1298.
Changes: selected return, component and flag fields from the unchanged R6 workbook; complete annual-factor cohort calculations; authored figures and captions. Missing years remain missing. These are nominal, local-currency annual research observations, not daily USD index paths.
JST material and our adaptations of it are provided under Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 International. The publisher's terms apply. This notice is specific to that material; it does not relicense Licensed price provider records or the entire website.
Long-run economic estimates
Maddison Project Database 2023, Groningen Growth and Development Centre. Jutta Bolt and Jan Luiten van Zanden (2024), Maddison style estimates of the evolution of the world economy: A new 2023 update, Journal of Economic Surveys, DOI 10.1111/joes.12618.
Changes: selected USA rows, extracted workbook source notes and graphical presentation. Historical estimates and the disclosed source-note anomaly remain publisher observations, not independently validated invested wealth. Used material and its adaptation retain the CC BY 4.0 attribution and license notice.
Coded conflict records
Uppsala Conflict Data Program and Peace Research Institute Oslo: UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset v26.1 and UCDP Conflict Termination Dataset v4-2024.
- Gleditsch et al. (2002), Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset; Davies, Pettersson and Öberg (2026), Organized violence 1989–2025, and violent political protests; Pettersson (2026), Codebook v26.1.
- Kreutz (2010), How and When Armed Conflicts End: Introducing the UCDP Conflict Termination Dataset, Journal of Peace Research 47(2), 243–250; Codebook v4-2024, June 24, 2025.
Changes: selected coded years, types and intensities; blank-cell normalization for interpretation, with original field strings retained; authored tables. No cross-vintage episode join or causal war/market score. Date precision and publisher discrepancies stay disclosed. CC BY 4.0.
Business-cycle dates
National Bureau of Economic Research, Business Cycle Dating Committee: U.S. expansion and contraction chronology. Copyright NBER; reused under the publisher's stated attributed-copy permission.
Changes: derived contraction-month boundaries and durations, timeline and tables. Month precision and retrospective dating remain explicit; these are not real-time recession signals. The first incomplete interval stays incomplete.
Historical interpretation
The Nifty Fifty reading cites Jeremy J. Siegel (1998), Valuing Growth Stocks: Revisiting the Nifty Fifty, AAII Journal. Author-reported cohort findings remain separate from our three selected surviving-company price cases. We link to the original study; we do not reproduce its full text or reconstruct its portfolio.
Research visible only in the local extension
Robert J. Shiller's historical financial research compilation supplies the optional monthly valuation/reference-price investigation. Kenneth R. French's Data Library supplies retained factor and portfolio research sections.
Changes: reviewed field selection, native period preservation, limited derived studies and exclusion of estimated or partial valuation months. Academic availability and this credit do not establish all downstream public, index or redistribution rights. These views must stay excluded from a public release unless their exact intended use is cleared.
Follow a figure to its exact source
This page credits source families. The selected figure's evidence is the record of its actual instrument, inputs, exclusions, capture vintage and method. For present coverage and documented absences, read Coverage & method. A citation is not a blanket license, and source providers are not sponsors of Market Backstory.