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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grommit who wrote (37808)	5/6/2010 6:32:31 PM
From: RumbleFish	Respond to of 78596

I wasn't in the market back then but I had begun to pay attention that October day in 1987 when the Dow dropped 22%. I think that was the first time people noticed what the robot traders could do. 25 years later not much has been done. The NYSE stepped in to throttle the market speed down today. I don't know what the damage would have been otherwise. Or if it made a difference.

To: Grommit who wrote (37808)	5/6/2010 6:41:21 PM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78596

What? Were you a kid in '87, and missed the big one in that year? =g= Now that was something. No one-hour thing and no instant tv reporting like CNBC, so phones ringing off the hook, rumors aplenty at the water cooler,so lots of fear and total surprise and shock. Pictures of dour-looking traders walking among piles of sell tickets that night on news. No interviews with any pundits to say "this too shall pass". Instead fear of worse to come the next day. In the sense that I'm old with a fading memory, I don't even remember some of the other bad days '63 (Kennedy), '67, '73. We're so used to bad news and volatility now, that this to me seems like just one more bad day. Exceptional, but not surprising or unique. And we all seem to have prepared at least a little for it -- margin down, cash up, speculative issues small, margin-of-safety being considered, more diversity among bonds/preferreds, etfs, etc. Everybody's done something by now, I'm figuring. Even if that just means tightening up stops -g-