November 3 in business history: a 48,000-ticket car show, 150,000 wrong copies, and a $313 billion listing
Three 3 Novembers where a price was set before the answer arrived — the 1900 car show that put gasoline last, the 1948 Tribune edition that called the election wrong, and Ant Group's $313 billion listing suspended two days before trading — each closing on a dated modern decision mirror.
Three 3 Novembers, and three verdicts issued before the evidence arrived.
In 1900 a crowd at the first national motor show ranked three engines and put gasoline third. In 1948 a newspaper printed an election result it did not have. In 2020 the largest share sale in history was priced, allotted, and then stopped.
Each was a claim about the future, sold at a price. Each answer arrived later, and each answer had a number in it.
The engine the crowd liked best
The Automobile Club of America opened the first national automobile show at Madison Square Garden on 3 November 1900, and it ran through the 10th. 1
The hall held a 20-foot-wide track so buyers could ride behind the wheel, plus a wooden ramp 200 feet long to test hill-climbing. 1
About 48,000 people paid 50 cents each to get in, roughly $24,000 at the door. 1 The country had bought about 4,200 new automobiles by then, and fewer than 1,000 of them ran on gasoline. 13
The crowd ranked the three power sources clearly. Electric came first, steam second, gasoline last. 12
The gasoline engine of 1900 deserved that placing. It was loud, hard to start, and ran on whatever light spirit the owner could find. 1
Then the ranking broke. Locomobile built 750 steamers in 1900, second in sales only to the Columbia and Electric Vehicle Company. 1 Olds sold 425 Curved Dash runabouts in 1901 at $650 each, and nearly 19,000 before the model was retired in 1905. 1
Gasoline cost about 15 cents a gallon, and it was the refinery's unwanted by-product looking for a buyer. 1
The show measured November 1900 precisely. Anyone who read its ranking as a forecast for the next decade got the next decade wrong.
Decision mirror: Kelley Blue Book counted 262,649 U.S. electric-vehicle sales in the third quarter of 2026, 6.4 per cent of new vehicles, up from 5.8 per cent in the second quarter and down 39.5 per cent from a year earlier. 4
That year-earlier quarter was the segment's best ever, above 10 per cent, because buyers rushed to use a federal credit before it expired. 4 Add hybrids and plug-ins and about a quarter of everything sold that quarter was electrified. 4
The 1900 show floor and the 2025 peak record the same thing: what a calendar did to demand. Size a plant or a product line on a single quarter's share, and you have priced a deadline as if it were a preference.
The edition that could not be recalled
The Chicago Daily Tribune, now the Chicago Tribune, put out its first edition of 3 November 1948 with the banner "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN" across the front page. 5 The vote had been the day before and the count was unfinished.
The paper had a record behind the call. Its Washington correspondent, Arthur Sears Henning, had named the winner in four of the five presidential elections since 1928. 5 The polls pointed the same way. 6
The deadline was the problem. Chicago's typographical union was on strike, and the Tribune had switched to a process that typed copy, photographed it and etched it onto plates, which put the paper to bed hours earlier. 7 That strike ran 22 months. 7
About 150,000 copies left the presses before the headline was changed for a later edition to "DEMOCRATS MAKE SWEEP OF STATE OFFICES". 5
Truman took 303 electoral votes to Dewey's 189. 5 Two days later, at St. Louis Union Station, he was handed a copy and held it up for the photographers. 56
The bill was small. The Tribune's own retrospective says the gaffe "did not seriously damage the newspaper", and framed originals are offered online at $1,000 to $5,000. 7 A wrong edition costs a paper reputation, and reputation repairs.
Decision mirror: On Monday night, an aggregation of prediction-market prices compiled by the analytics firm BetInt put Democrats at 95 per cent to take the House and 76 per cent to take the Senate. 8
More than $1.48 billion had been wagered on the midterms across Kalshi, Polymarket and Polymarket US, with Kalshi alone reporting $1.33 billion of volume across more than 28,000 markets. 8
In 1948 one newsroom made one call and printed it 150,000 times. In 2026 the call trades all day, and the loss lands on whoever took the other side. Check who holds the position before you treat the number as a forecast.
The listing that never traded
Ant Group, the company behind the Alipay wallet, set the price of its dual listing on 26 October 2020. 9
The Shanghai shares went at 68.8 yuan and the Hong Kong shares at HK$80, 1.67 billion new shares in each market, raising just under $34.5 billion. 9 That valued the company at $313.37 billion, more than Goldman Sachs or Wells Fargo. 9 Hong Kong trading was due to start on 5 November. 9
Hong Kong's small investors bid 389 times the retail tranche. 10 Some 1.55 million of them lodged HK$1.3 trillion, about $167.7 billion, much of it borrowed at 0.48 to 3.5 per cent. 10
On 2 November the central bank and other regulators issued draft rules for online microlending and summoned Jack Ma, Eric Jing and Simon Hu. 11
On 3 November the Shanghai exchange suspended the listing, citing "significant issues such as the changes in financial technology regulatory environment". 11 Hong Kong followed within hours, and Ant refunded the subscriptions with the brokerage commission and exchange levies. 10
The bill, when it came, was smaller than the listing. The central bank fined Ant 7.12 billion yuan, about $984 million, on 7 July 2023. 12 Ant had made 9.6 billion yuan in the December quarter alone, so the penalty cost less than one quarter of its profit. 12
The valuation never recovered. Alibaba's share of Ant's profit, booked a quarter in arrears, fell to RMB 5,048 million in the year to March 2026 from RMB 12,648 million. 13
Decision mirror: Ant International, the arm that the 2024 restructuring gave its own board, was seeking about $1 billion in June 2026 at a valuation of $10 billion or more, with a Hong Kong listing in view. 14
The parent priced at $313 billion in 2020 is now measured by what its pieces can raise alone. A listing price is a claim on a future that a regulator can re-date.
Three questions for the day
- Which number in your last board pack was a measurement, and which was a snapshot of a deadline?
- When you quote a probability this week, do you know who is on the other side of it?
- What would it cost you if the thing you priced today were re-dated tomorrow, and have you written that number down?
References
- 1
- 2What Happened on November 3
history.com
- 31st U.S. Auto Show Opened in New York City 115 Years Ago
neautomuseum.org
- 4
- 5Dewey Defeats Truman
en.wikipedia.org
- 6
- 7Vintage Chicago Tribune: 5 things that led to 'Dewey Defeats Truman'
chicagotribune.com
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
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