The stock market crash didn't hurt everybody.

Excerpts from the above article by PRISCILLA LISTER, San Diego Transcript City Editor

In fact, some people bet on the bear and came out of Oct. 19, 1987, far richer for it.

Two of those bettors were James A. Shepherd, 33, and David V. Blanton, 39, who with some partners made a mint on that Black Monday. ... they had specifically traded on the S & P 500 Index.

Before Black Monday, Shepherd and Blanton had bought put options that expired the third week in December on the S & P 500 Index that gave them the right to sell those contracts at 270 points. Then the market collapsed Oct. 19 and the S & P 500 Index dropped to about 180 points. They sold their contracts when that index averaged 210 points. While they had bought their position at an average cost of about $200, they said they sold them off at about a $30,000 net per position.

... they had anticipated a 50-to-1 return and got even better - some 70 times their original investment.

Such commodity trading, especially on the S & P 500 Index, is often called hedging, often used by institutional traders ...

Such trading is also acknowledged to be highly risky; many investors can lose entire stakes ...

Shepherd has created a computer model that has tracked influences on the market since the late 1800s. "It has never failed to track the top or bottom of the market within a 4 percent accuracy." he told the Transcript last January.

And just as that model is proprietary, so is his position in the market now.

"As far as the direction of the market, we don't want to predict," Shepherd said yesterday. "We don't make predictions because we want to maintain our integrity with out clients so that we don't give the information out freely anywhere ..."

A similar article appeared in January, 1988 in the San Diego Magazine.