As soon as the markets opened this morning, share prices tumbled by 465 points. They have since rebounded to within around 40 points of opening. It's a bit of a roller coaster.
NEW YORK – Wall Street struggled to steady itself Tuesday, climbing back from an early plunge after the Federal Reserve implemented an emergency interest rate cut in hopes of restoring stability to a faltering U.S. economy. The Dow Jones industrials, down 465 points at the start of the session, recovered to a loss of about 40 points.
The U.S. markets joined a global selloff amid growing fears that a recession in the United States could send economies around the world into a downturn. Though stocks regained ground as investors digested the Fed's move to cut its benchmark federal funds rate by 0.75 percentage point and as bargain-hunters entered the market, trading remained volatile and the major indexes fluctuated sharply, at times approaching the break-even point before heading down again.
Maybe the Fed cutting interest rates actually did help.
As I’m now retired, I trade in the market most weekdays for extra income.
I saw the futures before the open, and set my buy orders with ridiculously low prices.
Well…at 9:30am I was waitin’ like the gator…
All 4 orders clicked off and the market continued down, down, down. At one point, I turned off my computer and went outside to smoke a cigarette. I then asked myself if I was man or mouse. I marched back in and brought up my account, and was suprised to see the prices of my purchased shares screaming upward!
Not pressing my luck, I sold all, ending up $1602 on the day! This is usually about 2 weeks trading income for me.
I wouldn’t advise it for everyone because it was a wrenching few hours, but it worked, I know, because I put in those absurdly low price limit orders.
Excellent Mockinbird, get in and get out. There was a fair amount of Fed induced short-covering going on so the next few days will tell.
But bravo, nice move, I stayed on the side lines too scary.
Gutsy move, Mockinbird. Well played.
This is a well written essay and is pretty much straight to the point.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/22/magazines/fortune/sloan_irrational.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008012217
I’m not a big fan of ft.com but this editorial makes sense.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fde28e3c-c925-11dc-9807-000077b07658.html
I hope all the links aren’t annoying but this problem is big.
Yeah, they do make sense. I am a bit worried at the sudden rate cut, but it does seem to have arrested the fall. They are quite correct that what happens down the road is equally important.