February 28th, 2007

the markets

My coworker lamented his stock market losses yesterday - I had no idea how bad the damage was until I logged into Fidelity and noticed that my losses on my stocks (FXI, FECAX, IWM, QQQQ, and SPY) ranged from -4% to -10%.

What's fascinating about this is that apparently there was a technology glitch at 3pm - the bearish sentiment was flooding the market with sell orders, which caused the Dow Jones to hiccup and drop about 250 points immediately.

I'm curious to find out the result of that technology glitch - did it trigger any margin calls? Did it cause sentiment to swing one way ("A glitch, let's buy" or "Oh god, this is the worst day ever, let me just sell everything!"). The meltdown of the sub-prime lenders (NFI) and the weakness of the Chinese markets contributed to yesterday's losses, but did the actual glitch affect the markets, too?

Looks like the market is rebounding today, so I guess there's nothing to worry about in terms of market strength.

Posted by roy at 12:56 PM in Finances | 2 Comments

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linders1025
Comment posted on February 28th, 2007 at 02:54 PM
i lost a lot too :(
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bert
Comment posted on February 28th, 2007 at 02:45 PM
it was a reporting glitch. meaning that the reporting of markets at the time around 3-4 was slightly delayed...

meaning when the sells started, and all the calls were covering... well.. snowball trigged and we dropped 250 points. I lost on average 3.5% of my portfolio yesterday.. yes.. that hurt.
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