9/11 Market Crash Experience

James Altucher shares his first-hand experience of witnessing 9/11 and how it impacted his financial situation.

"My business partner and I ate breakfast every day at the Dean & Deluca on the first floor of the World Trade Center. That morning, we were walking to my home office when my partner turns to me and says 'Is the president coming into town?' because there was this plane right overhead. Then boom - we watched it go right into the building. Physically we watched it, not on TV. Everybody on the street instinctively ducked.

Your brain does weird things. When my business partner Dan said 'We're being attacked,' I said 'No, no, that was just an accident. No one's in the building.' My brain was telling me this even though it was quarter to 9 AM.

We ran to the fire station and said we wanted to help. These guys threw two fireman suits at us and said 'Get this on, we're going straight over there.' We started putting them on but then they asked 'Are you guys firemen?' We said no, we just wanted to give blood or whatever we could do. They said 'No, no, only firemen.' That fire station, the Duane Street Fire Station - 100% of those people died who went to the World Trade Center that morning.

It was a bad day, but that also clinched me losing everything because I had been invested in the stock market that morning and everything went to zero after that. I was desperate for like a year and a half - couldn't sell my place, there were no jobs, I had no friends anymore."