He was ridiculed in 1999 for predicting Dow 40000. Look who’s laughing now.

livemint.com:

David Elias received a surprise in the mail earlier this month: a dozen baseball caps with Dow 40000 printed on the front and Elias on the back. The caps were a gift for a celebration that was 25 years in the making. Elias, who is 79 years old and lives in Williamsville, N.Y., predicted in his 1999 book, “Dow 40,000: Strategies for Profiting from the Greatest Bull Market in History," that the index would cross the milestone by 2016.

He missed the mark by eight years, but the forecast was better late than never, he said in an interview. The 30-stock index charged past 40000 in intraday trading for the first time May 16—and then closed above the mark the following day. The benchmark has since pulled back, but it has risen about 4% this year and has more than doubled from its pandemic-era low in March 2020.

Elias’s prediction turned out to be optimistic in part because he, like almost everyone else, didn’t see major turning points in advance, in this case the 2000 dot-com bust and the 2008 financial crisis that hammered stock returns for significant periods. That led to years of mockery online. The Dow fell about 30% between January 2000 and September 2001 to a low of 8235.81 after the Internet bubble popped.

Then in March 2009, it tumbled to as low as 6547.05 following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the government-sponsored bailouts of other lenders. One reviewer on Amazon.com wrote of the book on March 7, 2009: “Makes a great doorstop! or paperweight. Might be good for squashing a cockroach.

The pages could be torn out and used to light your fireplace. Lots of good uses yet for this one!" The book is available for sale in used condition on Amazon at prices from $3 to $97.64. It has a 4.1 rating based on 16 reviews.