The market seems to be selling-off on the back of limited bad news imo, apart from the dollar that is.

If you can hold your nerve and apart from any short term requirements to offload poor performing stocks, I have a couple!!, my advice would be sit tight. This does not have the feel of the tech(mining!) bubble at all. Difference being there are a lot of good fundamentals, unlike in 2000 when there were a lot of over rated nothing companies.

the brakes were put on yesterday morning in new york , computerised trading stopped

speculation of a rate cut by the fed

IMO, the cause of wild swings is less to do with computerised trading and more to do with a burgeoning derivatives market. CFD and spread betting are so common now that any movement is wildly exagerated because the profits and losses available are wildly exagerated, by leveraging you would consider imprudent if a quoted company you held had the same level.
Strangely, there may be a chance that the disease and cure are one and the same, as highly leveraged bets are caught out by a sudden lurch, and the punters concerned lose so much, they stop doing it (for a while).
A reduction in the money being ploughed into CFD's etc. will settle the market, and fundamentals will out. Whether they are healthy or not is another point, but the market will find equilibrium. It is designed to.
All IMO etc................

prior to CFDs there were traded and standard options which also traded on similar margin, so your argument about same does not hold water.

and to save the comment, CFDs positions require a counterpart to buy/sell the balancing stock as necessary, which is/was exactly the same as with options

I didn't write they didn't exist. I wrote they were burgeoning.
Now your point doesn't hold any water.

ah well, you can't uninvent the atom bomb either! .... would never expect you to agree with anything i write (and vice versa most times), having seen such when i became boorishly repetitive about what a carp company SEO was - well still is, just

anyway, must be a racing certainty that the markets will gyrate terifyingly this afternoon, and goodness knows where they will close ...... both possibilites are real possibilities!

fed propping up the markets before the start , a bounce now a possibility

the brave (or foolhardy man) would now place a long on the Dow but set a target

just games at the mo

If the Dow bounces enough (which it won't right now) ,i'm shorting it cynic.

was that the bounce or the rebound of the bounce then ...?

he ain't sayin'! ...... Dow is currently -140 ... it has hovered between this sort of level and -110 virtually since opening ...... i would not be surprised to it recovery to -40 or better, but i hope i am not brave enough to put money on it

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Futures markets began betting Friday that the Federal Reserve will institute an emergency interest rate cut this month in the wake of the credit worries that have roiled U.S. markets in recent weeks.

bet they don't! That really would be admitting to dire probs and would be likely to send markets crashing still further

i have my doubts cos the dollar will plunge causing even more chaos

things looking a bit dangerous now

nice quote:

"It is unwise bordering on imprudent to assume that terrible will not follow bad," Catalano said.

Hmmm! (the DOW) its bounced DOWN ... (or shall we say rebouded off the bounce). Its looking dire - I wounder wher AVE got the oomph from

sned , all sorts going , shorts closing i would suspect causing bounces , we will see

Y(W)anks rocking but not rolling yet!

at least that brings a really nasty couple of days to a close in London.
now we must all hold our breath to see what the evening brings and of course Monday

Grim !