`BLACK MONDAY' RECALLED; '87 MEMORIES STAY VIVID FOR SURVIVORS.Byline: Bruce Meyerson Associated Press Associated Press: see news agency. Associated Press (AP) Cooperative news agency, the oldest and largest in the U.S. and long the largest in the world. After watching the market tumble for three straight sessions, no one expected an easy day when Wall Street went to work Monday, Oct. 19, 1987. Perhaps, some hoped, they had already seen the worst. But within minutes of the opening bell, the only thing anyone could be sure of was the closing bell at 4 p.m. ``It reminded me of the old B movies where you see the airplane going down. You see the altimeter altimeter (ăltĭm`ĭtər, ăl`tĭmē'tər), device for measuring altitude. The most common type is an aneroid barometer calibrated to show the drop in atmospheric pressure in terms of linear elevation as an airplane, spinning, and that's what it was like watching the quotes,'' said Robert Streed, who on ``Black Monday'' was a portfolio manager with a small Chicago firm and is now senior investment adviser at Northern Trust, also in Chicago. With orders flooding in at three times the normal pace, the exchanges were quickly overwhelmed. Everyone's ticker fell way behind in reporting the latest prices, and Wall Street was flying blind as the Dow Jones industrial average Dow Jones Industrial Average The best known U.S. index of stocks. A price-weighted average of 30 actively traded blue-chip stocks, primarily industrials including stocks that trade on the New York Stock Exchange. plunged 508 points. But with so many trades to execute and clients to console, there was no time for traders, brokers and analysts to panic. All they could do was ride it out. So they set up war rooms and hunkered down in the trenches. Mostly, they stared at their quote machines, which were telling an unbelievable story of financial carnage: unbelievable in scope, and unbelievable because the quotes they were spitting out were ancient history. ``You were actually placing orders by closing your eyes, throwing them in, and seeing the price about an hour later,'' said Arthur Hogan, who in 1987 was a trader for Fidelity Capital Markets and is now senior trader at Morgan Stanley  To comply with Wikipedia's , the introduction of this article needs a complete rewrite. Dean Witter Dean Witter may refer to:
While daily trading volumes of 500 million shares are now commonplace on the New York Stock Exchange New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) World's largest marketplace for securities. The exchange began as an informal meeting of 24 men in 1792 on what is now Wall Street in New York City. , it was only last month that Black Monday's then-record tally of 604 million was supplanted from the NYSE's top-10 list of busiest days. That crush of trading, mostly sell orders, befuddled even seasoned investment professionals. ``It got so bad that it became funny,'' said Larry Wachtel, a Prudential analyst whose signature market updates have been a fixture on local New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of radio for two decades. ``What I think shook me as much as the market was Larry,'' said Russ Labrasca, an analyst at Principal Financial Securities of Dallas who worked with Wachtel at the time. ``When Larry was beginning to show signs of fear, it began to rub off to clean anything by rubbing; to separate by friction; as, to rub off rust s>. See also: Rub .'' CAPTION(S): Chart Chart: (Color) How the stock market came back Associated Press |
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