Chicken Little panicked & the whole chicken coop fell right in line behind him.
The DJ is down 7½% right now. Does this qualify as a crash? What is the specific cause? (if there is one) Are people just going off half-cocked and selling out of fear/uncertainty? Are billions of dollars really just evaporating as CNN would have me believe? I can understand the airlines taking a hit in the market, is 700 points on the Dow just from the airlines alone?
Well, I assume no one is scrambling to buy insurance stocks right now, either.
So far there is no crash, just a drop. The drop is not big enough for the safety net to kick in.
Talk about messed up, the Dow is down a trillion points and yet my companies stock (a defense contractor) is up 8.48 as I type. Methinks the investors think was is afoot.
You can start panicing when the drop hits 10%. The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) has agreed to stop trading for set periods of time when the Dow drops by 10%, 20%, and 30%. For more details, go here.
Grrrr. Make that war is afoot. Stupid fingers can’t type woth a damv.
Remember it’s not the number of points the DOW is down, but the percentage. If the day ends and we are only down 7% I would declare that a victory.
People (or more likely institutions) are selling… that’s for sure… but it’s not a panic yet. What will be interesting is where we are a week or a month from now. It’s too early to speculate what this particular drop means int he long run.
Yeah, I’m not an expert, but as an extremely small-potatas investor, I was pretty comfortable with a drop of only 7.5%. I also wish I had a little extra money lying around; I’d buy me some airline stock. I think that, over the long haul, the chances are extremely slim that America will be willing to do without the convenience of air travel. Of course, I wouldn’t invest in Joe’s Airline ‘n’ BBQ; I think the smaller carriers may well go wingtips up. But I can’t see a sustained crash of the whole industry.
damn, i knew i should’ve bought some cell phone stock this morning: nokia has gone up about 12% today. and poor united has lost about %60, damn that sucks, but damn we should be buying these up at a low cost tomorrow.
No, I don’t think so. We’ll see a shift of funds out of the insurance and airline industries and move into defense, security, cell providers, and pharmaceuticals. Others will shift their funds from stocks to more secure investments like T-bills, bonds, etc. This is only day one. Let’s see what the market looks like at the end of the week. To me, this seems like a great buying opportunity. Those of us who are patient with our moeny will benefit in the long run.
Webex is up 30%. The reasoning is obvious.
In addition to the airlines, the cruise lines have been hit bad - I’m wondering about that. Anything associated with leisure travel is worrisome, but I wonder if cruises will see that much of a loss in business. You have to balance them being perceived as a terrorist target against the possibility that some people may actually see them and other “isolated” vacations like Club Med as being a more secure alternative to travel in a foreign country. Also, the concerns about added hassles associated with air travel (3 hour checkin times, etc) are likely to clobber business travel far more than vacation travel (you’ll tolerate this sort of thing for a flight to a two-week vacation destination, but not for a one-day business meeting - hence, the interest in Webex). Unfortunately, the airlines make their money on business travel.
Remember also that the Dow is only 30 companies, and some of those are airline related and got hit quite hard today and pulled down the average:
UTX - United Technologies - down 29%
BA - Boeing - down 18%
HON - Honywell - down 18%
A 7.13% one-day decline doesn’t even qualify for the top-ten list. The steepest one-day drop was 22.6% in 1987. There was a worse day as recently as 1997, when there was a 7.19% drop during the Asian financial crisis.
The drop in airline stocks has no direct bearing on the Dow Jones Industrial Index, because the airlines are not among the companies that make up the index. Boeing is part of the DJIA, however, and it’s down 17.3% today. Some of the airlines, together trucking companies and railroads, are part of the Dow Jones Transportation Index, which is down 15.12% today.
I understand the principal losses have been among airlines, insurance companies and financial services companies. To me, that indicates that this is no broad panic but that the decline relates to specific industries that have been damaged in specific ways by the WTC attack–e.g. airlines were grounded and will presumably see a lrage decline in travel, insurers will be paying out many many millions for damages caused last Tuesday, and a number financial services firms were directly wounded.
It’s worth noting that the recovery from a disaster normally causes GDP to jump up. While the devastation destroys some of the nation’s wealth, the process of recovering from that devastation creates new economic activity, and that drives GDP up.
I know that Honeywell is big in Defense, what about Boeing? And why is Honeywell dropping if it might come out ahead in the case of sustained hostilities?
All I can say is, fucking VOD and LU (down 1.3 and 6.7% respectively)! I’m gonna be handing out shares of LU to the kids at Halloween. Scratch that. Better not or they’ll come back and soap my windows!
So why are GE and DOW each down 10%?
I don’t know much at all about the stock market, but wouldn’t now be the time to buy and get stocks at bargain prices? I mean, in the short term you might take a hit but as time goes by won’t the stocks just go back up again?
Biggest one day point lost ever…
Sky did fall, someone’s Internet plan to get people to buy must have fallen on deaf ears.
This is really stupid but I’ll ask. What about trains. I mean if you have 3 or 4 hours checkins at the airlines and say St Louis is 5 hours from Chicago, couldn’t one infer from this it would be just as easy to take a train.
Admittedly it doesn’t sound like trains will ever make a come back
I got a lot of money I’ve been waiting to invest. I wonder how low the trans stocks can go.