These are brutal days on Wall Street and when the going gets tough, the tough get ... well, a little bit depressed actually.
With the Dow Jones Industrials Average plunging to its lowest level since October 1998 and the NASDAQ faring even worse, the high-octane world of the trading floor is suddenly running on empty.
"It's depressing, you know ... traders get very depressed," said Todd Leone, managing director of equity trading at SG Cowen Securities Corp. "It's difficult to come in every day and lose money. Everybody I talk to is tired. It's like `Oh I need a couple of days off. The markets have been beating me up.' That's how you feel."
PHOTO: AFP
Rational thought seems to have fled the US stock markets, chased away by a tidal wave of emotion -- or more specifically, outright panic -- among investors whose confidence has been shattered by a series of corporate scandals.
The psychological meltdown has left people like US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and New York Stock Exchange chairman Richard Grasso looking like waterlogged Little Dutch Boys, struggling to plug gaping holes in the dyke of public concern.
"Please be patient. Please don't do something that emotionally feels good but, in the long term, will be a mistake," Grasso pleaded to investors on Sunday after yet another week of market bloodletting.
President George W. Bush echoed the "don't panic" message on Monday when he stressed that US economic fundamentals were strong, despite the horrendous declines that have wiped seven trillion dollars off the value of stocks since March 2000.
"I know the economics -- the platform for growth is in good shape," Bush said.
So far, such assurances have fallen on deaf ears, and the investors are continuing to sell their positions almost as fast as the traders can trade them out.
The stressful nature of the job and the high burn-out rate mean that the composition of trading floors has always had a strong bias towards young, gung-ho operators.
So for many traders in their twenties and thirties, who revelled in the astonishing bull run of the 1990s, the current crisis is an entirely new and unsettling experience.
Suddenly, jobs are on the line and the prospect of the traditional hefty annual bonus has been wrenched away for the foreseeable future by the downward spiral of the Dow Jones average.
Unexpectedly, however, the trading floor seems to exude an eerie surface calm.
The emotional temperature and decibel levels may surge from time to time, but for the most part the atmosphere is subdued with the traders hunched sombrely over their flashing screens.
"You still get some yelling, but I find when people are losing money they tend to be quieter," said Leone. "The jokes and the bravado just dry up after a while."
In such trying times, some companies are looking to relative "old-timers" to help guide their younger colleagues along.
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