CHESSNOID

Those numbers tell the story for the day. Today was just another day on Wall Street.   Believe it or not, they didn’t close at their worse numbers of the day. The numbers actually bounced up in the last hour.  If you are long in stocks, that really doesn’t change your mental state. I do feel for you.

The big news was Wachovia with a massive quarterly loss:

Wachovia Reports $23.9 Billion Loss for Third Quarter

The bank took an $18.7 billion charge to write down the value of good will and wrote off $6.6 billion in credit losses tied largely to its disastrous purchase of Golden West Financial in 2006. And the red ink is unlikely to end soon.

Wachovia projected an additional $26.1 billion in mortgage-related losses in 2009. And it only wrote down a tiny portion of its $219 billion commercial real estate and corporate loan portfolio. Analysts expect that to significantly deteriorate as the economy plunges into a recession.

Wachovia’s record-setting loss translated into $11.18 a share, compared with net income of $1.6 billion, or 85 cents a share, in the period a year earlier.

Wachovia’s quarterly loss appears to be one of the largest in banking history. It is bigger than the market values of 422 companies that make up the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, and slightly more than the gross domestic product of Panama.

When the news was announced, the market really didn’t react too bad. I think it was priced into the market. I think when the other business news story came out, then investors started getting cold feet again. Sellers took over and buyers fled. This story of the day is common on Wall Street lately and seems to happen every other day. Here’s the closing numbers:

Will there be a bounce tomorrow? Their usually is a bounce the day after a sell off like this. Buyers actually started coming in the last hour today. I think the more substantial down days we have like this that make it to the TV nightly news, the harder it will be to attract buyers to take advantage of the low prices. I think there is a better chance of the markets gaining momentum downwards tomorrow to test the 8,000 DOW mark which is another 5% off today’s closing numbers.