Capstone 20 Fast Facts
Timeline of the Past Twenty Years
2004: Capstone’s founding coincides with the launch of Facebook, the successful landing of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the beginning of Apple’s of ‘Project Purple,’ a secret initiative to develop what would become the iPhone.
2005: Reality hits as Hurricane Katrina makes landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast, killing thousands and causing an estimated $108bn in damages. Volatility sharpens, causing speculators to test commodity prices and policymakers to pay heed to impending climate change.
2006: At year end, 2006 is heralded as ‘phenomenal’ for the U.S. stock market as the Dow Jones pushes past 12,000 for the first time, bouncing back after a sustained campaign of interest rate hikes led by outgoing Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan.
2007: In the Middle East, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum commits $8.2 billion to the eponymous Knowledge Foundation based in Dubai; the largest single charitable contribution of its kind.
2008: January sees global stock markets crater as the 2007 subprime mortgage and the erosion of bank reserves propagates fears of a Global Recession. Lehman Brothers files bankruptcy in September, while AIG makes an unprecedented request for short-term financing from the Federal Reserve.
2009: While the financial system scrambles to recalibrate after the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto lays the “Genesis” block that kicks off the growth of the now-famous cryptocurrency.
2010: Christened ‘The Year of Uncertainty and Volatility’, the beginning of a new decade brought earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, war in Yemen, a coup in Niger; a sovereign debt crisis in Europe; the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, swine flu and the trillion dollar ‘flash crash’, which lasted 36 minutes. On the plus side, 2010 was also the year that our solutions business came into being.
2011: Volatility hastened in 2011 with protests and revolutions collectively known as the Arab Spring and civil war in Syria. Across the Atlantic, the Occupy Wall Street movement picks up support, before fizzling out in November.
2012: Political and economic uncertainties collided as Hurricane Sandy forced the New York Stock Exchange to shut down for the first time in 27 years. This rare event disrupted major exchanges like NASDAQ and exposed the fragility of financial markets, further unsettling investor confidence during an already tense election season.
2013: Financial media coins the ‘2013 Taper Tantrum’, characterized by a spike in U.S. treasury yields as the Federal Reserve announces a scaling back of its asset purchase plan. Derivatives traders turn their eye to volatility rippling across emerging markets.
2014: After a year defined by the brutal wars waged by the self-proclaimed caliphate ISIS, rerating of sovereign debt and fears of market turmoil dovetail with the outbreak of Ebola that commentators describe as the ‘toxic cocktail’ of 2014.
2015: China’s stock market bubble bursts putting the brakes on a rising China as a third of the value of A-shares on the Shanghai Stock Exchange evaporated in one month. Interventions from the PRC cause investors to pause on emerging markets and re-evaluate regulatory risks.
2016: The Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffett cautions that banks’ dependence on derivatives is a ‘potential time bomb’ if there was market discontinuity, causing investors to re-evaluate derivatives pricings.
2017: Military exercises undertaken by North Korea in the Sea of Japan stir serious concerns of an overreaching nuclear dictatorship. By December, the UN Security Council voted 15-0 in favor of further sanctions levied on the hermetic state.
2018: On February 5, investors bear witness to “Volmageddon”. In the space of a single trading day, XIV notes shrank from $1.9 billion in assets to $63 million as a spike in the Cboe Volatility Index called into question the non-macro risks of short volatility products. Paul enjoys the unexpected reveal of Incredibles 2.
2019: Before the first case of Covid-19 is identified, 2019 was described by The New York Times described as the “best year in human history” as child mortality reached its lowest ever recorded level and an estimated 170,000 people moved out of extreme poverty daily.
2020: In March, the VIX closed at the highest level since its inception in 1990, whipped up by a combination of the Covid-19 Pandemic, the 2020 Russia-Saudi oil price war, travel bans and a consequent recession. Worldwide economic activity plummeted, as governments turned to protective measures to save lives and avert large-scale bankruptcies.
2021: The global rollout of Covid-19 vaccines allows for the resumption of economic activity, recorded from space by new explorations and ISS missions undertaken by NASA, the UAE and SpaceX.
2022: ChatGPT is released publicly by OpenAI, kickstarting an arms race in AI. Meanwhile, the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX raises the alarm on regulatory controls of digital tokens and their intermediaries.
2023: Described by some as the ‘Year of Calamities’, 2023 broke records for hosting an estimated 240 worldwide natural disasters. At the same time, a banking crisis brought with it two of the three largest banking collapses in U.S. history.
2024: As 79 countries and a quarter of the world’s population votes in national elections throughout the course of the year, Capstone celebrates its 20th Anniversary in unprecedented – but thoroughly prepared for – uncertainty.