Investopedia opened its digital doors on 15 February 1999. From that day forward the site served as a living reference for definitions, analytical essays along with step-by-step guidance on every corner of money management. The dictionary now contains more than 14,000 entries that record events, instruments, technologies in addition to turning points that re shaped capital markets between 1999 and 2024.

The final calendar year of the twentieth century closed with Prince’s “1999” on FM radio, with mass anxiety over the Y2K computer glitch, and with the public debut of Investopedia. Programmers feared that legacy software would misread the date rollover from 31 December 1999 to 1 January 2000, corrupt databases next to paralyze power grids. The feared blackout never arrived. The new decade brought broadband, a term that entered everyday speech once cable companies replaced dial up tones with always on connections at one megabit per second or faster.

Between 1995 and March 2000 venture capitalists, day traders, pension funds poured capital into any corporation that added “dot-com” to its name. Analysts justified triple digit price-to-earnings ratios with phrases such as “page views,” “network effects,” and “first-mover advantage.” The Nasdaq Composite Index rose from 1,000 to 5,048. When quarterly reports revealed that profit remained elusive – selling began. By October 2002 the index traded at 1,114, a 78 percent collapse that vaporized eight trillion dollars in market capitalization.

A bear market denotes a decline of at least twenty percent from a recent peak. Since 1928 the S&P 500 crossed that threshold on eighteen separate occasions, or once every 3.6 years on average. The 2000 – 2002 bear market erased half of the index value. The 2007 – 2009 bear market repeated the loss and pushed the unemployment rate to ten percent. The pandemic induced bear market of 2020 lasted thirty three trading days, the shortest on record.

The Great Financial Crisis originated in the U.S. mortgage market. Lenders issued adjustable rate loans to borrowers who supplied no proof of income, no proof of employment, and no proof of assets. Wall Street banks bundled the loans into mortgage backed securities and sold the paper to pension funds, insurance companies along with foreign central banks. When teaser rates reset, delinquencies soared. Home prices fell thirty three percent nationwide. Foreclosures reached ten million. The S&P 500 lost fifty seven percent of its value between October 2007 and March 2009.

Congress responded with the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. The law created the seven-hundred-billion-dollar Troubled Asset Relief Program. Treasury purchased preferred stock in Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, General Motors in addition to Chrysler. The Federal Reserve cut the federal funds rate to a range of zero to twenty five basis points and launched three rounds of quantitative easing. Employers slashed 8.8 million payroll positions. Monthly job losses averaged seven hundred thousand during the winter of 2008 – 2009.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform but also Consumer Protection Act of 2010 rewrote the regulatory map. The law created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bureau policed predatory lending, simplified mortgage disclosure forms, and published complaint data on credit card issuers, student loan servicers, and debt collectors.

Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin white paper on 31 October 2008. The Genesis Block arrived on 3 January 2009. The protocol capped supply at twenty one million coins and rewarded miners with fifty coins per block. The first recorded price quotation placed one bitcoin at nine tenths of one cent. By February 2025 a single coin changed hands at ninety nine thousand dollars. Holders who never sold became known as “HODLers,” a misspelling that originated in a 2013 forum post.

Fast Fact

The Patient Protection besides Affordable Care Act reached President Obama’s desk on 23 March 2010. The nine-hundred-page statute expanded Medicaid eligibility, subsidized private insurance purchased through state exchanges, and prohibited insurers from denying coverage on the basis of pre existing conditions. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the law reduced the number of uninsured citizens by twenty million.

Environmental, social next to governance investing moved from the margins to the mainstream. Index providers launched ESG benchmarks. Asset managers marketed low carbon exchange-traded funds. Global assets under management in ESG-labeled products rose from fifteen trillion dollars in 2014 to thirty trillion dollars in 2022.

The Racketeer Influenced or Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 turned fifty three years old in 2023. Prosecutors used the statute to indict the Gambino crime family, executives of FIFA, rapper Young Thug, former President Donald Trump. Charges included mail fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and murder for hire.

Brexit fused the words “Britain” and “exit.” The United Kingdom held a referendum on 23 June 2016. Fifty-two percent of voters chose to leave the European Union. Prime Minister David Cameron resigned the next day. Negotiations consumed four years. The U.K. formally withdrew on 31 January 2020. The pound sterling fell from 1.50 to 1.32 versus the dollar on the night of the vote. Gross domestic product growth slowed from 2.4 percent in 2015 to 1.3 percent in 2019.

Consumer-price inflation surged in 2021. Congress had approved five trillion dollars in pandemic relief. Supply chains snarled. The consumer price index rose seven percent in 2021 and 6.5 percent in 2022. The Federal Reserve lifted the federal funds rate from zero to five-and-a-quarter percent in sixteen months.

Meme stocks combined retail zeal with social media virality. GameStop, AMC Entertainment, BlackBerry along with Bed Bath & Beyond attracted short interest that exceeded one hundred percent of the public float. Users of Reddit is r/wallstreetbets forum encouraged mass purchases. GameStop peaked at 120 dollars on 25 January 2021, up from 3 dollars six months earlier. The rally collapsed in 2022. GameStop traded below 10 dollars by 2024.

An inverted yield curve occurs when the two year Treasury note yields more than the ten year note. The spread turned negative in July 2022. Each of the last eight recessions followed within twenty four months.

Artificial intelligence entered the investment lexicon in 1956 when John McCarthy coined the term at Dartmouth College. Venture funding returned to the sector in 2012 after deep learning algorithms slashed image recognition error rates. Meta, Microsoft in addition to Nvidia allocated tens of billions of dollars to neural network research. ChatGPT reached one hundred million users in two months. Nvidia’s market capitalization crossed three trillion dollars in 2024.

James Truslow Adams introduced the phrase “American Dream” in 1931. The historian defined the dream as “a better, richer next to happier life for all our citizens of every rank.” Investopedia readers search for guidance on budgeting, homeownership, college savings, retirement planning in pursuit of that ideal.