MetaFilter posts tagged with crash and stockmarket

Down, down, down.

CheeseDigestsAll — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 18:28:57 -0800

By one measure, this stock market is as bad as any in the last 180 years.

Look out below...!

Asparagirl — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:18:35 -0800

While the US equities markets were closed on Monday for Martin Luther King Day, stock markets around the world took a nosedive, losing billions in equity; the markets in Australia, South Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Germany, France, the UK, and more countries have dropped at least 5% each (Canada only fell 4.75%), even though most of those markets had already been seriously down for several days prior. India has been hit particularly hard, at one point down a whopping 11%, tripping their markets' automatic "circuit breakers" for a mandatory time-out period, before scraping back up to close at 8% down. US futures markets are currently predicting a 650+ point drop just at the open Tuesday morning, before even a single trade goes through. In a bit of serendipitous timing (for us, not for him), one poor young daytrader started posting unedited videos of his daily trading activities on YouTube several weeks ago, which meant that his Sunday night breakdown and Monday night quarterbacking (both videos NSFW for language) are both online for the world to see. (He was long the futures market without stops and lost about $40k out of his $55k account.) I suspect similar sentiments to the ones he expressed in his Sunday night video are going to be echoing throughout many offices on Wall Street this week...

And yes, the band did play on.

Mutant — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:25:01 -0800

It was twenty years ago today... on October 19th 2007 that US Equity markets had their biggest one day movement ever. Following up on an overnight 5% correction which jolted Hong Kong, a sharp, 10% sell off that hit London, the Dow collapsed 508 points, or over 22% in one day. The value of US Equities decreased by over one trillion dollars during the last of four days of relentless selling. Several weeks later, Nicholas Brady was appointed by then US President Ronald Reagan to lead a commission investigating this event. Their conclusion was simple: stock valuations were not at fault, rather the existing infrastructure wasn’t equipped to handle a huge surge in trading volume. Three of the commissions recommendations ( "Brady Report", 1988, Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms): improved settlement and clearance procedures, increasing capacity at the exchanges and, somewhat controversially, “market circuit breakers” which slow then ultimately stop trading should equity prices first tumble, then sharply move down in value (I say “controversially”, as nobody complains if a share gains 100% in one day, now do they?) Andrew Lo, author of "A Non-random Walk Down Wall Street" (Princeton University Press, 1999) stated in today's FT "We now have a much better integrated and connected set of financial markets. Disruption in one can very easily spill over". What's your view? Do you think another US Equity market collapse would, for example, drive a flight to safety in US Treasuries? Or would massive losses in the stock market cause bond yields to skyrocket? What would the impact of such a huge equity market loss be on single stock futures, which weren’t tradable products in 1987 but were available – and widely blamed – for the 1929 crash? While those on the correct side of a tumbling futures contract would welcome variation margin, would the equity and futures markets disconnect? Would we first see ripples, then a violent tsunami like wave of selling engulfing all markets? Curiously, significant international news of that time also was US / Iran saber rattling. Deja-wha?

puddsharp — Tue, 29 Oct 2002 02:08:57 -0800

A speculative bubble is created when objectivity, reasoning, and valuation give way to greed and an insatiable desire for profits. On this date in history... October 29, 1929: The date of the stock market crash that marked the start of the Great Depression in the United States. Could it have been averted by the reading of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay?