Word: bottomed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Everybody knows by now that we put in a bottom in that first hour, one that we will no doubt retest in the coming days, but one that smacks of as much of a bottom as its '87 counterpart. As in all bottoms, there were no sellers, just buyers--panicked ones at that--and I had to reach for stocks 2 and 3 points above where they looked to be trading at the time on my screen...
...know it was the bottom? Conventional wisdom has it that IBM's massive buyback triggered the optimism. But those of us in the trenches know that it was a Merrill Lynch monster buy order of Pepsi, entered at 9:31 a.m. by the beverage company itself, that convinced many scared traders that they had better start buying. The cool calm of Pepsi opening flat--most other stocks indicated a $3 or $4 dip--changed everything. Within seconds after the opening bell, Pepsi let it be known that it would General-Jackson its own stock, standing there, Stonewall-like, right under...
...timers like me, that smacked exactly of the bottom in '87, when companies took advantage of the madness to buy stock incredibly cheap. Sure enough, by 9:40, even as the market was "looking" down 200, Pepsi was up. We traders, herd animals by instinct, take heart when we see a big capper like Pepsi rallying, and we pull our sell orders. Boom, there goes the supply, and nothing begets demand like no supply...
...will have a rout to the upside. Guys who passed on buying Citicorp at 105, and then 110, and then 115, and then 120, and then 125, reach for $128 stock. I personally moved Telebras 10 points in a futile attempt to buy 25,000 shares. At the bottom the screens simply failed to function, and nobody really knew where anything was, but we all knew that something had changed, something for the better, and it felt as lasting as you can get in this nanosecond trading world. I was able to scoop up some Dell Computer...
...every trader knows, we have to retest the ugliness of last Monday before we have the cathartic capitulation. In fact the rest of the week unfolded in textbook irony, almost exactly like '87's postcrash aftermath. Which means we are probably a few more days away from a bottom. How will you know? Easy: business will be back on the business pages where it belongs, and talk of a year-end rally will fill the air. And the only people still at the corner of Broad and Wall at 6 a.m. will be selling coffee and bagels...