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Strategies & Market Trends : MDA - Market Direction Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Secret_Agent_Man who wrote (46623)	4/16/2000 11:59:00 AM
From: Phillip Crone	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 99985

Possible about panic selling and traders not being able to get online with their brokers, but I have one angle to add. (I've been trading for about 20 years). In the old days news didn't travel so fast, no one could "trade" except brokers and institutions, you had to actually call your broker with your actions and in those days of panic you couldn't get through to your brokers and NYSE and NASD weren't set up to handle quick panic volume. Today we live in a different world. Most traders watch their trades tick by tick, they can make instantaneous decisions regarding selling or buying. I believe that might be why in the future that last week will be considered a crash in the Nasdaq even though it took 5 days to drop 25%. Granted volume was only a bit over 2 billion on the Nasdaq on friday, but my point is quite possibly the "panic" selling is spread out a bit now versus one big rush in the old days where the little investor got home from work, read the next morning's newspaper and then got around to calling their brokers. Another factor is that the circuit breakers are so much wider on the NYSE that Panic is not quite a rampant as traders won't try to be the older smaller collars. Now with all that said, I'm the first to admit that maybe I'm wrong, maybe on monday everyone logs on at the same time, maybe half can't get on, panic set's in, phones are busy and 8 billion shares are traded which crashes all computers. Guess we'll have to wait and see but long term I'm in the camp that growth is good and inflation is low and good fundamentals will paint a good picture for the next year or so at least. The last point I'll make is the democrats don't want to lose the office, they know the surest way to get kicked out of dodge is for all of the 401k's in America to get cut in 1/2, which is why if there is such a thing as the plunge protection team they may be hard at work, as well as a quick settlement in the MSFT case. If that doesn't work then a couple of interest rate cuts or even not cutting would brighten things up a bit at some point in time. Now that taxes are out of the way things might get back to normal if that word can be used today.

To: Secret_Agent_Man who wrote (46623)	4/16/2000 4:24:00 PM
From: jbe	Respond to of 99985

>>>>>>What if the ebrokers/online camp shuts down on monday and no one can get thru?<<<<<<< Whaddya mean -- what if it shuts down on Monday? As far as I know, it was already shutting down on Friday-- and on a few other days over these past two weeks. On a couple of occasions, the entire Internet was slowed down -- it took forever for ANY site to open! I don't even have an on-line account, yet I could not get through to my brokerage (Waterhouse) on Friday afternoon. Must have been all those e-traders who could not access their on-line accounts, and so were trying the phone line instead. In any event, I was on hold, waiting for "the next available broker" for 2 1/2 hours -- and then was disconnected! I am lucky in that Waterhouse has a local branch office here (in Washington, D.C.). You can't phone it directly (!), but you can go there physically, which is what I plan to do Monday morning early, to make my trades. And then, if I have to, I will go down a second time, in the afternoon. Ridiculous, but necessary. But you have a real point, raising this issue. Some people have already lost thousands because they could not make trades in a timely fashion, and some may lose thousands more. And this is bound to add yet another chaotic note to what is already a chaotic situation. IMO, the online/discount brokers had no business offering quick service, if they proved unable to provide it when the going got tough. Well, as they say, you get what you pay for. What you get on the cheap usually turns out to be shoddy.