Market Madness

Total madness in the US stock market this afternoon. At around 2:40pm the DJIA slid down around -360. By a little before 3pm the DJIA was just shy of being down -1000 intraday. Panic. The market rallied back hard and finished down -348 points for the day which is still gross. Reasons for the sharp decline have ranged from a trading error in which a trader fat-fingered a couple extra zeroes on a sell order which then triggered stop orders across the broader market, to the more rational European Sovereign debt contagion issue, to outlandish conspiracy theory stuff. Nobody knows for sure, but this does not ease the lingering fears of the retail investor considering whether or not to get back into the market. Anyway, check out this PG chart for today. I bet you'll never see a chart like this again.

Chart from Yahoo! Finance