re: #172 Hecuba’s daughter

Wasn’t the problem on Monday, though, the new computer driven trading technique of “portfolio insurance”? The human element was taken out of the equation, and the computers sold, sold, sold …..

I beleive it exacerbated it, but really, people were panicked. It was the first really big bull market of most people’s lives, and a lot of people had discovered borrowing on margin. The rules then allowed you to borrow a larger percentage of the value of your portfolio, so there were a lot of margin calls.