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To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (77410)	9/15/1999 4:41:00 PM
From: 10K a day	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

'Does anyone have a gut feel for the market selloff at the end today? The cause is my question.' errrr,,,,I bought NITE?? <g>

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (77410)	9/15/1999 5:27:00 PM
From: Eric Wells	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 164684

>>Does anyone have a gut feel for the market selloff >>at the end today? Glenn - I can think of a lot of reasons - but you know I have a rather bearish view of the market at the moment. And I've long given up coming up with explanations for advances or declines (it seems that the market moves on its own - and those that analyze the market look for reasons after the fact). But if I had to, I would probably look to the following reasons for today's sell-off: 1. Triple witching on Friday - this is Cramer's explanation for the sell-off. 2. CPI report was not good enough to offset the impact of yesterday's retail sales number (note that the Fed has raised rates in the past in the wake of decelerating CPI numbers) 3. People are starting to think that factors outside the core CPI and PPI numbers are actually important (it's interesting in that I believe that tobacco and airline tickets are included in the core, while gasoline and food are not - I'm no economist, but I would think that more people in the US drive and eat every day than fly and smoke). 4. Continued terrible advanced/decline lines - don't know if you read Helene Meisler's column in TheStreet.com, but she has continually pointed out that the NYSE advance/decline line has been heading south for the past 18 months. 5. Tech sell-off due to Oracle's failure to beat estimates. Since most of the gains in the market of late have been driven by technology stocks, then it seems appropriate that the overall market would decline on bad tech news. 6. Continued belief that the Fed might factor in the impact of high equity prices when deciding on whether to raise interest rates next month. 7. Profit-taking. From 4 weeks ago, everything is up - most of the nets are way up - and maybe people are taking money off the table. 8. Lack of overall market breadth - do you realize that 70% of the gain in the S&P this year is due to only 15 stocks? (mostly tech stocks) 9. Falling dollar - hit 103 yen last night. 10. Looming October - not a good month for the market historically - and maybe some investors are starting to pull back. But as Mark Twain once said: "October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February." Of course, if the market had gone up today and you had asked me why, I probably would have listed all the same reasons, changing the negatives to positives. Thanks, -Eric