September 26 in business history: a phrase Congress left undefined, $14 billion in one session, and a first close 11 percent below the offer
Three September 26s — the Federal Trade Commission Act in 1914, the New York Stock Exchange's worst session since 1929 in 1955, and Peloton's first day of trading in 2019 — each settled by a number the business did not set.
Three September 26s, spread across 105 years, each decided by a number the business did not get to set: a phrase Congress handed to five commissioners to define, one trading session that took $14 billion off the New York Stock Exchange, and a first-day share price that landed under the price the offering had just been sold at.
The phrase Congress left undefined
On September 26, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Trade Commission Act, which created the commission in the shape it still has: five commissioners, no more than three of them from the same political party, each serving a seven-year term, with the first five drawing staggered terms of three, four, five, six and seven years that ran from that date. The president chose the chairman from the members. A commissioner could be removed only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office" 1.
The bill had taken two and a half years to get there. Oklahoma congressman Dick Thompson Morgan introduced the first version on January 25, 1912, and that bill failed; antitrust dominated the 1912 election campaign; Morgan reintroduced an amended version in the special session of April 1913. The Senate passed it 43-5 on September 8, 1914, and the House passed it on September 10 without recording a vote 2.
What the Act did to the machinery already in place is the part worth holding on to. The Bureau of Corporations, set up in 1903 inside the Department of Commerce and Labor, had been able to investigate and report; the new Act abolished it and moved its employees and functions into the commission 13. The commission could issue cease-and-desist orders. The conduct it was told to stop was written down as "unfair methods of competition," a phrase the statute left undefined 2. Congress amended the same section in 1938 to reach unfair or deceptive acts or practices as well 12.
A business in 1915 learned the boundary from the commission's orders instead of from the text, because the statute named a standard and handed the standard to five people to work out. The decisive figure here is a headcount: five people who get to say what the words mean.
Decision mirror: The last piece of the 1914 design was removed 112 years later. On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court held in Trump v. Slaughter that the FTC's for-cause removal provision is contrary to the separation of powers, over a dissent from Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson 4. The case began when President Trump fired the commission's two Democratic members, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, in 2025 and told them their continued service was "inconsistent with [his] Administration's priorities" 4. The rulemaking route faced the same kind of test: on July 8, 2025, the Eighth Circuit vacated the FTC's "click-to-cancel" negative-option rule in its entirety because the commission had declined to conduct the preliminary regulatory analysis that 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(1) requires 5. The definition of unfair competition still sits with the commission. Who controls the commission is now a presidential question.
One session, $14 billion
Eisenhower's heart attack began on a Denver golf course in the afternoon of Friday, September 23, 1955, where he blamed the discomfort on a hamburger with onions. He woke shortly after midnight with severe chest pain, and it was Saturday afternoon before an electrocardiograph confirmed a significant heart attack 6. The news reached the public over the weekend. Monday, September 26, was the first day the market could answer, and sell orders had been arriving at brokerage houses by wire through Sunday 7.
At the 10 a.m. opening gong the floor of the New York Stock Exchange held about 2,000 brokers, clerks and messengers around 18 trading posts, and for many of the blue-chip stocks that had led the bull market an opening price proved impossible to find 7. The people who had to solve that were the specialists, the members obliged to keep an orderly market by buying or selling for their own account when orders ran short. One specialist laid out $618,000 for 25,000 shares of American Airlines; two others paid $605,000 each for 22,000 shares of U.S. Steel; the specialist handling Union Carbide put up $1,500,000 for 15,000 of the 17,500 shares suddenly dumped on him. Altogether the specialists paid out an estimated $100 million for stock nobody wanted at the previous closing prices 7.
By noon, 3,400,000 shares had traded, nearly four times the normal amount. Du Pont did not reach the board until 3 p.m., half an hour before the close, at 210, down 20⅞ points; General Motors opened at 11:38 a.m. and slid from 143⅞ to 135 7. The session finished with 7,720,000 shares traded, more than double the usual volume. The Dow-Jones industrials fell 31.89 points, the rails 11.15 and the utilities 2.46, and the composite average of 65 stocks dropped 10.76 points to 162.75. Half of the entire 1955 gain was gone, and the depreciation on the 1,500 stocks listed on the Big Board came to $14 billion — the sharpest break since October 1929, when the losses had reached $16 billion 7. The American Heart Association's account puts the same day at a 6 percent fall in the Dow and a $14 billion loss, the largest since the 1929 crash 6.
The market reversed within days. Buyers returned on Tuesday and Wednesday, and by the end of that week the Dow-Jones industrials closed at 466.62, about 11 points above where they had finished on the day of the break. Wall Street's phrase for it was that stocks were now selling "ex-Eisenhower": every share price carried an assumption about whether the president would run again 7.
Decision mirror: The same mechanism ran on June 10, 2026, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 953.33 points, or 1.87 percent, to 49,918.78, the S&P 500 lost 1.62 percent and the Nasdaq Composite 1.98 percent, after President Trump said Iran had "taken too long" to negotiate and threatened more attacks. West Texas Intermediate settled 2.07 percent higher at $90.03 a barrel 8. Thirty-two points across 1,500 stocks in 1955 was a loss of about 6 percent of the index. On June 10, 2026, 953 points was 1.9 percent of an index sitting near 49,900. One fact from outside the market still reprices the whole board in a single session; the depth of the fall is now measured against a far larger base.
The price on the first day
Peloton Interactive priced its initial public offering after 7 p.m. on September 25, 2019: 40,000,000 Class A shares at $29.00, the top of its range, with the underwriters holding a 30-day option on 6,000,000 more and a concurrent private placement of 3,448,275 shares to affiliates of the existing investor TCV at the same price. Trading was to begin on the Nasdaq on September 26 under the symbol PTON, and the offering was expected to close on September 30 9.
The first trade was $27, about 7 percent below the offer price, and the stock closed at $25.76, about 11 percent below it. The offering raised $1.16 billion and valued the company at $8.1 billion; by the close the market value stood at $7.2 billion 1011.
This is what the buyers were pricing. Peloton counted 1.4 million members, meaning account holders. Fiscal 2019 revenue was $915 million, up 110 percent from $435 million the year before, against a net loss of $245.7 million that had widened from $47.9 million. The bikes cost around $2,000 and the treadmills around $4,000, and a $19.49-a-month app carried roughly 102,000 digital subscribers 10. The listing came into a cold stretch: WeWork's owner had postponed its offering the week before, SmileDirectClub had slid 28 percent on its debut, and Peloton's first day was the second-worst of any unicorn that year, ahead of Uber's 7.62 percent decline 10.
The first verdict then ran in both directions. The shares climbed to an all-time intraday high of $171.09 on January 14, 2021, close to six times the offer price 12. By the close on May 2, 2024 the stock was $3.13, and $1,000 put in at the 2019 IPO was worth about $108 12.
The business has since settled into a shape the first day did not describe. For the year ended June 30, 2026, Peloton reported total revenue of $2.446 billion and its first full year of net income, $63 million on a GAAP basis, with adjusted EBITDA of $468 million. Paid connected fitness subscriptions fell 247,000, or 8.8 percent, to 2.553 million, and the company guided the coming year to $2.3-2.4 billion of revenue, down 3.9 percent at the midpoint 13. The market values the whole company at about $2.15 billion 14.
Decision mirror: The chief executive's own account of that year reads: "Fiscal 2026 was a defining milestone as Peloton delivered its first full year of net profitability driven by our improved revenue trajectory and substantial improvements in our cost structure" 13. A company that came to market 11 percent under its offer price now earns money on a subscriber base 8.8 percent smaller than the year before, and the $25.76 first close sits far nearer today's $4.92 than to the $171.09 the stock touched in January 2021 101214.
When the number comes from outside
- Which of your constraints is written as a standard nobody has defined? The 1914 Act prohibited "unfair methods of competition" and left the phrase to the commission to fill in, case by case 2. For 112 years the commissioners doing that filling in could not be removed at will; since June 29, 2026 they can 4.
- What single fact is your whole position priced to? On September 26, 1955, one bulletin about a president's health took $14 billion off 1,500 stocks in a session and wiped out half the year's gains, while the exchange's own specialists funded the floor with $100 million of their own money 7. The index closed that week 11 points above where it had ended on the day of the break 7.
- Which of your numbers is the one you actually have to hit? Peloton was sold at $29 a share and an $8.1 billion valuation, closed its first day at $25.76 and $7.2 billion, peaked at $171.09 in January 2021, and carries a market value of about $2.15 billion today alongside its first full year of profit 910121314.
References
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- 2Wikipedia, "Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914"
en.wikipedia.org
- 3Wikipedia, "Federal Trade Commission"
en.wikipedia.org
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- 13Peloton Interactive, "Peloton Announces Q4 & FY2026 Financial Results", August 6, 2026
investor.onepeloton.com
- 14CompaniesMarketCap, "Peloton (PTON) — Market capitalization"
companiesmarketcap.com
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