Who is downing the Dow? (Economic terrorism?)
Sense of Calm Is Swept Away in the Final Minutes
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Published: October 27, 2008
At 3:50 p.m., the Dow Jones industrial average was nearly flat for the day, an encouraging end to a volatile session and, perhaps, a sign that some manner of relief had started to come to Wall Street.
Ten minutes later, the Dow was down 203.18 points. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index had dropped 3.2 percent. Stocks that had soared earlier were flashing red. And investors were left to ponder the remains of another lost day.
“That was a little weird,” Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at S.& P., said, moments after the market skidded at 20 points a minute. “Usually, you get a sense of it in the last hour or half-hour, not the last 5 or 10 minutes.”
But, he added, stocks may now be in a permanent state of anything goes.
“In some ways you can say, ‘Are you really surprised?’ ” Mr. Stovall said. “It’s been engaging in this kind of slithering pattern for a while.”
The Dow spent the day reeling across a 450-point range, plunging at the open after sell-offs in Europe and Asia, recovering after an encouraging report on sales of new homes, and then falling again for reasons few analysts felt they could explain. The index finished at 8,175.77.