The bottom line: As a sandpile grows, all sort of sand “avalanches” take place, but it is impossible to predict how big or how often they occur. Sometimes a few grains roll down the slope, while occasionally a large avalanche carves a big section of the sandpile. The size and frequency of those avalanches, mathematically speaking, bear a notable resemblance to the size and frequency of earthquakes, solar flares, river floods, forest fires, and stock market returns. Intriguingly, all of them have defied attempts at prediction. The question is why.
Finally, don't think you can avoid market crashes by getting out of stocks before one. That's "market timing," and it rarely works. Index-fund pioneer John Bogle has quipped, "Sure, it'd be great to get out of stocks at the high and jump back in at the low... [but] in 55 years in the business, I not only have never met anybody who knew how to do it, I've never met anybody who had met anybody who knew how to do it."
The joint 2010 report "portrayed a market so fragmented and fragile that a single large trade could send stocks into a sudden spiral",[23] and detailed how a large mutual fund firm selling an unusually large number of E-Mini S&P contracts first exhausted available buyers, and then how high-frequency traders (HFT) started aggressively selling, accelerating the effect of the mutual fund's selling and contributing to the sharp price declines that day.[42][23]
The month began with more bad news. The Labor Department reported that the economy had lost a staggering 240,000 jobs in October. The AIG bailout grew to $150 billion. Treasury announced it was using part of the $700 billion bailouts to buy preferred stocks in the nations' banks. The Big Three automakers asked for a federal bailout. By November 20, 2008, the Dow had plummeted to 7,552.29, a new low. But the stock market crash of 2008 was not over yet.
The housing market will not grow forever, but it is hard to say when things will change. As Dennis said, real estate trends are very different in various parts of the country. Some parts of the country may see increasing prices for a few more years, while others may see a drop right away. I agree with Dennis that a housing crash like we saw in the mid-2000s is not coming anytime soon. I could see prices steadying out due to the affordability problems in some areas, especially if interest rates rise. Those two factors will not cause a crash when so few homes are being built and the quality of new loans is so high.
The U.S. game industry lobbied in Washington, D.C. for a smaller $1 coin, closer to the size of a quarter, arguing that inflation (which had reduced the quarter's spending power by a third in the early 1980s) was making it difficult to prosper.[21] During the 1970s, the dollar coin in use was the Eisenhower dollar, a large coin impractical for vending machines. The Susan B. Anthony dollar was introduced in 1979, and its size fit the video game manufacturers' demands, but it was a failure with the general public. Ironically, the new coin's similarity to the quarter was one of the most common complaints. In Canada, existing dollar bills were removed from circulation and replaced with coins in 1987.
Hey DK. Since your brain is pegged to the 4th dimension. The $30 K I lost was back in 2002 when the dot com blew. I was making $90 K a year. Like spilled beer. Did not affect me. I was trading $20 K blocks at a time day trading. Its called the market maker, making the stock move. These are things you could only dream of. You cant even understand foreign exchange. The Yuan is not pegged to the dollar as you claim. You should stick to simple shit like beans and bullets. Economics is beyond you…
There was a chart floating around in early 2014 that had a 97.5% correlation between the stock market of 1928-29 and the stock market of 2013-14. That chart boldly predicted a massive stock market crash in 2014. Instead, from when the market was supposed to crash into the end of the year, stocks rose nearly 10%, and were in the middle of the longest bull market in history.

As you can see, there is more to preparing for a market crash than making a stock market crash prediction. “Experts” predict crashes all the time, and most of the time they get it wrong. If you listen to all these crash predictions, you will end up losing out on the upside. And yet, you should never be in a position where a crash will wipe out your portfolio or brokerage account. To prepare for a crash, you should make sure your portfolio is diversified, and that you don’t have too much of it allocated to high beta and growth stocks.

Think back too about how you handled past downturns or, for that matter, how you reacted when stocks began to dip and dive. You may not be able to nail it exactly, but you want to come as close as you can to a blend of stocks and bonds that you'll be okay holding in a variety of market conditions, and then make whatever adjustments are necessary to get you to that mix.
According to the NYSE TICK, or uptick minus downtick, index, at precisely 2:43pm, the selling order flood was so big it not only surpassed the acute liquidation that was observed around 3PM on Wednesday, but the -1,793 print was one that had not been seen for 8 years: as Bay Crest Partners technical analyst Jonathan Krinsky wrote, the sudden and violent surge in selling as measured by the TICK index, when downtick volume overpowered upticks, was the lowest reading since the May 6, 2010 “flash crash” when liquidity dried up in markets, sending the market plummeting for a few minutes, as HFT briefly went haywire (or when a spoofer outsmarted the algos, depending on what version of events one believes).
Most importantly, China’s debt binge was taken up in record time; soaring by over 2,000% in the past 18 years. And this earth shattering debt spree wasn’t used to generate productive assets. Rather, it was the non-productive, state-directed variety, which now requires a constant stream of new debt to pay off the maturing debt. Therefore, the schizophrenic communist party is caught between the absolute need to deleverage the economy; and at the same time, trying to maintain the growth mirage with additional stimulus measures.
Job one in the midst of a stock market crash is to be aware of your own exposure to the market. Are you highly leveraged as a margin investor? Is your investment portfolio overly weighted with riskier growth stocks or other more-speculative stocks? Has your personal financial situation changed significantly over the course of a 24-hour market collapse?