What Happened Last Thursday in the Stock Market?

Well, we had a terrible shock this past Thursday when the stock market plummeted by 1,000 points within a record breaking time period. I’ll remember this for a long time to come, because I monitor the stock market pretty closely when I am at work, switching to the Yahoo Finance page fairly often while I’m working, to see what stocks are doing, and they were doing ok on Thursday from what I could tell, dropping a bit thanks to the Greek crisis, but then when I was taking a little lunch time nap in my car, something happened around the hours of 2:30.

I remember waking from my nice little afternoon nap in my car, the sun streaming down from the sunroof and also in through the side windows, and turning the news on. WNPR to be exact. They were all in a tizzy because apparently the DOW and other indexes, especially the NASDAQ, which is comprised of tech stocks, plummeted within a very short time period, which is very unusual.

I quickly went to my stocks app on my iphone, and looked up my favorite stocks and my “watch list” stocks to see what was happening with them. Many of them had dropped by a couple dollars, in a half hour! I had never seen such a wild roller coaster of a drop in such a tiny amount of time! So naturally, thinking I might be missing out on the biggest news story in stocks of the year, and perhaps the biggest bargain buying opportunity for a while, I started my car and started back to the old workstead.

By then, most of these several dollar drops had somewhat stabilized and unfortunately I could not have bought at yearly lows like I though I could, but it really made me think how delicate the stock market and the investor’s mentality still is now, even as we are seemingly pulling out of this mire we’ve gotten into.

Now, they are trying to figure out just what happened to cause such a precipitous drop in such a small window of time. They are thinking there was some sort of glitch in the system that must have caused such a terrible drop. I even logged into one of my 401k accounts, where I do my own trading of stocks instead of entrusting all of my money to mutual funds, which I don’t believe to be the most advantageous thing for me.

There was a popup message that the amounts in my account may not be entirely accurate because of a speculated glitch in the stock trading system, so not to rely on the numbers completely! Scary stuff guys, let’s hope it rallies this week and we don’t see another heart stopping drop like that. That’s all we need now….