LOS ANGELES - "Please don't tell my husband I've just lost $50,000," one woman sobbed.
The Charles Schwab brokers were calling to tell the private investors hunched over their home computers that it was time to settle their positions and cut their losses before they became any bigger. The amounts involved were not monstrous - most day traders do not hold on to much stock for very long - but still big enough in some cases to warrant second mortgages, sale of assets, cancellations of Caribbean holidays. On the West Side of Los Angeles, where for months home-based investors have reaped the stock market whirlwind and contributed to a furious boom in house prices and trendy new restaurant openings, the sobriety of the moment was sinking in fast.
"I'm down 20 per cent, what can I tell you?" said day trader Lorraine Conn.
Glen Mathison, a spokesman for Charles Schwab, acknowledged there had been "some level of dizziness" but said most of his company's clients were level-headed enough to take a long-term view and not give themselves over to panic.
That did not mean the atmosphere was any less than frantic in the homes of day traders or at securities brokerage firms.
Most at risk were the short-term individual investors who had bought up batches of a few hundred shares in high-tech stocks on the Nasdaq index.
When the index plummeted, as it did for two days, those stocks reached a value so low that the difference in purchase price and current selling price exceeded the credit limit those investors had with their brokerage firms.
The brokers then "called in the margins" - a polite way of saying that they were collecting their debts by forcing their customers to sell, triggering automatic losses running into the tens of thousands.
In the Internet online chatrooms where the New Economy stock boom started, there was a frenzied mixture of elation, despair and greed as stocks plunged down, then caught their breath again. Many - if not most - were as gung-ho as ever, in the relentlessly optimistic atmosphere that characterises the world of cyber-trading.
"Really wish I had more money to throw at the market now ... great leverage opps," said Mercury in the Daytraders chatroom. "Covered all my short positions - first time ever," said Segman, who was being more cautious. "A lot of houses going to market this month," said DayRaider.
Who were these people? Senior citizens day-trading from their Florida condominiums? The independently wealthy who became dot.com millionaires on the tech-stock boom? Or the taxi-drivers, concierges and bus-boys who have been sucked into the vortex of the boom?
In the grammar-free rhethoric of the chatroom NDennis0249 trumpeted: "Oh, this is going to be a NIIIIIIIIIIICE ride."
Node, who apparently had little time for the fiddling while the Nasdaq burned, said: "You guys think this is fun? This is CRASH! ... We beat 1987 CRASH today!"
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