Mr. Market’s Wild Ride
I tell you it's been an interesting afternoon in the markets - Dow loosing 700 points in 15 min and then making back 600 in the next 20 min... what a wild ride! I'm sure there are a lot more interesting ways to spend the day, but I've never been in a place where an hour was as hectic as that hour.
People were far too hectic for the systems they built - prices were delayed, and in this market that's a major issue. But hey, when you've been trying to tell them what they need, and they keep putting it off, well... now they see the value.
I'm sure it'll bounce back up the rest of the way in the coming days, but it was pretty interesting to see it happen.
UPDATE: It seems that the prevailing theory is that this spike in PG (Procter & Ganble) was the trigger that started the massive drop:
from there, it was panic. Nothing fundamental changed, just automated trading systems with traders monitoring them not really thinking about what they were seeing. Pretty amazing story of humans and group panic.