For the first time yesterday this bear market felt like the painful bear market I experienced after the dot com bubble and I could almost feel the fear and despair coursing through the market as the Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed 777.7 points or 7% because Congress rejected the $700 billion bailout plan. The day of unlucky 7s was a historic day because it represented the largest one day point drop in the Dow. However this does not compare with Black Monday experienced in 1987 when the Dow shed 508 points or 22.6% in a single day. The Dow would have had to drop 2,518 today to match that performance.
Watching the emails, IMs and calls I received along with the stories in every form of media, it certainly felt like a day of capitulation. The market had called Congress’s bluff. As the Editor-in-Chief of MarketWatch.com David Callaway so eloquently put it in his article,