The history of the stock market has always been one of market turbulence and stock crashes. Many investors have diminished their wealth or even completely lost it through stock speculation, while others have made fortunes with stocks. There seems to be no foolproof recipe for successful stock investment; it is difficult to gauge the right timing for entering or exiting the markets. In this century, there have already been several major crashes in global stock markets: starting with the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000, when particularly small shareholders invested in media, IT, and telecommunications companies, many of which did not survive the boom. In 2007/2008, the US mortgage crisis shook the markets worldwide, and in the summer of 2011, it was the national debt in the US and Europe that sent stock prices plummeting within a matter of days.