'The perfect storm': Black Monday 25 years on

BLACK MONDAY

Henderson's Chris Burvill, manager of the £1.2bn Cautious Managed fund, recollects his experience of the 1987 stock market crash known as 'Black Monday', and asks whether it could happen again.

This crash didn’t come out of a clear blue sky, literally. The hurricane had happened only three days before and the UK market had been virtually closed on the Friday. The insurance and disruption costs in themselves were set to have been a big bill for the insurers. Ironically I remember thinking over the weekend that the DIY stores would do well out of the storm. The underlying issues had been brewing for some time: interest rates had been kept too low too long, as the bond markets were already indicating, and there had already been a sharp equity sell-off in the summer as some star...