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Doom -- but lots of stocks were a good buy...
The roar was visceral: a gutsy grunt of defiance. For a few heady minutes on Friday afternoon, traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange cheered aloud as they briefly heaved the stock market into positive territory.The effort was Herculean: a dwindling band of optimists pouring billions of dollars into a few selected shares in the hope of encouraging others to rally round. Twice they succeeded, only to see the forces of panic overwhelm them each time. Finally, New York closed for the weekend, once again in the red: bringing temporary relief to a global rout that has reduced the value of most international markets by a fifth in just five brutal days. Listening to the animal language of the trading pit, it is easy to forget that securities trading is just a mathematical invention -- nothing but the abstract agglomeration of pricing data. The sober Reuters wire service wrote on Friday of investors being "castrated". Scandinavian bank Enskilda warned clients that markets were "at riot point". "It's like someone cancelled gravity yesterday," added one London trader. Posted by: 3dc 2008-10-12 |
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