DOW drops 330 points after inauguration

[BriarFox]

Dow Falls More Than 330 Points; S.&P. Drops More Than 5 Percent

After hearing the new president's inaugural address,
investors went back to selling stocks, sending the major
indexes down sharply. Traders on the floor of the New York
Stock Exchange paused at times to watch the inauguration
ceremony and President Barack Obama's remarks, but the
transition of power did not erase investors' intensifying
concerns about the struggling economy. At the close, the Dow
Jones industrial average was down more than 330 points, or
about 4 percent, while the broader Standard & Poor's
500-stock index fell 5.2 percent.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na

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Crazy futures markets ...

[NocturnalRob]

eh, global markets took a steamy dump all over everything. i'm surprised it wasn't down more.

[Kembal]

Not a surprise. No trading on Monday, so this was the first market reaction to Citi and BofA.

I'm starting to think that banks should never be allowed to get that big.

[The Ponzzz]

I was wondering when this would make it to the PC. BoA dropped -2.05, sucks for all you who have their stock options.

[Kranar]

I honest to God love news stories about the stock market. Pure comedy.

Journalists can't help but pretend like everything that happens on the stock market today is correlated with today's news.

I remember when the US captured Saddam Hussein, shortly after the announcement the Dow soared and there was a news article on Bloomberg trying to correlate the two, stating how Saddam Hussein's capture has given investors new hopes, oil prices will begin to decline, blah blah blah...

At 3:30 the Dow begins to crumble... once again, Bloomberg posts another news article stating "Saddam's capture unable to give boost to the markets."

Nothing else really happened on that day, so journalists just figured to correlate the two events as if the stock market was some really ADHD person just waiting for the next news event to come out and link it with how the stock market moves; as opposed to a very chaotic web of information where events from the very distance past can have unintended and unpredictable consequences today (strange attractors/fractal geometry anyone?).

Similar stories happen all the time, the so called narative fallacy. It's why I'm a fan of not listening to the news when I trade. The best time to analyze the news isn't when the cable news network immediately comes out and reports breaking news... the best time to analyze it is atleast a month later.

In reality, the stock market does not instantly react to every piece of news. There's no chance in hell anyone can determine at this moment what effect Obama's inauguration had on the stock market or if it even had a measurable effect on the stock market today.

Other than Obama, which is the big news of the day so very easy to try to correlate with everything in the universe... other things that happened include no trading yesterday in the U.S. whereas worldwide several markets plunged yesterday, the USD is up against many other currencies today which means that US equities decline in price. For all anyone knows the U.S. market is just catching up to a 3 day lag.

[NocturnalRob]

State Street dropped almost 60%. Uncool. Couple of VPs there are my clients.

[NocturnalRob]

There's no chance in hell anyone can determine at this moment what effect Obama's inauguration had on the stock market or if it even had a measurable effect on the stock market today.
any time the market goes up in the next 4 years, it's because of Obama. Any time it goes down, it's a residual effect from 8 years of Bush.

duh.

[Kranar]

I'm starting to think that banks should never be allowed to get that big.


Join the club.

[The Ponzzz]

Join the club.

Exactly.

[Dwarven Empath]

^^

[nub]

What Dwarven Empath said.