On June 18, 1923, the first Checker Cab rolls off the line at the Checker Cab Manufacturing Company in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Morris Markin, founder of Checker Cab, was born in Smolensk, Russia, and began working when he was only 12 years old. At 19, he immigrated to the United States and moved to Chicago, where two uncles lived. After opening his own tailor’s shop, Markin also began running a fleet of cabs and an auto body shop, the Markin Auto Body Corporation, in Joliet, Illinois. In 1921, after loaning $15,000 to help a friend’s struggling car manufacturing business, the Commonwealth Motor Company, Markin absorbed Commonwealth into his own enterprise and…

By The Associated Press June 16, 2011 (AP) Key dates in the history of IBM: —1911: The company that would later become IBM is formed as the Computing Tabulating Recording Co. —1914: Thomas Watson Sr., a former executive at National Cash Register Co., joins the company. Watson becomes the company’s guiding force over the next four decades. —1924: Company renamed International Business Machines. —1936: Helps administer the new Social Security program with its punch card system. —1944: The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), the first machine able to execute long computation automatically, is presented to Harvard. Eight feet high and 50 feet long, the electromechanical switches of “Mark I” could…

Summary Box: 100 Years of “Think” at IBM By The Associated Press June 16, 2011 (AP) THE MILESTONE: International Business Machines Corp. turns 100 on Thursday. THE CONTRIBUTIONS: Everyday tasks of technology, such as computer storage drives, bar codes used in supermarkets and the magnetic stripes on the back of credit cards. THE FUTURE: While IBM’s Watson attracted buzz by beating two human “Jeopardy!” champions, the company wants to put it to real-world use as a medical diagnostic tool and work on other big data projects.

June 16, 2011 Eric Parnell http://seekingalpha.com/article/275284-stock-correction-may-have-much-further-to-go The stock market is vastly overvalued. While much has been made over the last few weeks about the current market correction, it’s merely a scratch on the surface when put into perspective. Sure we’re down 8%, but we’re still above the levels from just a few months ago in mid March. And we’re still positive for the year and 4% above the market peak at the end of QE1. From a historical view, the market is well above where it should be at this stage of the current secular cycle. And things could get very unpleasant for stocks if the underlying forces supporting the…

This article was published in November of 2007 http://genxfinance.com/a-visual-history-of-the-stock-market-from-1996-2007/ With the current volatility in the market, it causes people to begin questioning their investments and wondering where we’re headed. In my profession, I have to work with uneasy clients daily, and it can be difficult to remind them that the stock market is constantly moving and generally goes through cycles. The market can’t go up indefinitely, nor will it go down indefinitely. More often than not, we’ll see periods of growth followed by periods of volatility or sideways movement, and then have a period of falling stocks that is followed by more volatility before the cycle repeats itself. A Glimpse…