On Friday Oct 15 it seemed that we had stock market commentaries for that day spread among at least five threads. It seems somewhat silly to have one day's commentaries about one topic scattered so.

Perhaps we can handle that topic for Monday the 18th in a somewhat more practical manner.

Jerry

-- Jerry B (skeptic776@erols.com), October 18, 1999

Answers

In case anyone has not noticed, most Asian stock markets seem to have opened to the down side.

Whether US markets will do so too, we shall see in a few hours.

Let me mention that frequent postings of index numbers are probably redundant. :-)

Jerry

-- Jerry B (skeptic76@erols.com), October 18, 1999.

Dec. S&P futures open on the upside--+1.7 now

-- restless (restless@LI.com), October 18, 1999.

The seas of History slosh over the shores of our selfishness.

-- Spidey (in@jam.riptide), October 18, 1999.

Spidey, that's quite a tongue twister!

MFU

-- Man From Uncle 1999 (mfu1999@hotmail.com), October 18, 1999.

As indicated

-- top it off (to@the.top), October 18, 1999.

In the interest of consolidation, I'll post here. From TheStreet.com:

Ever ybody's Talking Capitulation, but Nobody Wants to Sell.

By Justin Lahart, Senior Writer, 10/18/99 1:04 PM ET It's either a sign of real weakness or a sign of the diminished stature of one of Wall Street's most-admired bulls that positive comments this morning from Goldman Sachs strategist Abby Joseph Cohen have done little to shore up the ailing U.S. stock market. Maybe both. "There has been much stock-price skittishness due to worries about economic deterioration," wrote Cohen in a morning note. "We believe that these concerns are unwarranted." Cohen noted that recent inflation reports have been skewed by one-off factors and said that, in any case, the bond market is already discounting further Fed action. She also suggested that some of the recent nervousness in the market stems from investor impatience with a range-bound market.

Such was Cohen's suasion in past years that an upbeat call from her to the Goldman sales force was enough to bust the market's funk. This has not been the case today. Tech stocks have fared poorly from the get-go, and other major indices have been at or below the flat line for most of the session. And market internals (see below) remained poor.

"Traders are again looking at the advance/decline line, which is so lousy," said Bill Allyn, head of block trading at Jefferies. "It doesn't seem like there's much resiliency -- I think there's more to go on the downside."

That's the chatter all over Wall Street.

"We have some work ahead of us before we bottom this thing out," said Bob Dickey, managing director of technical analysis at Dain Rauscher Wessels. "You hear a lot of talk, and I agree, that it's going to take some kind of capitulation. This relentless kind of declining, when nobody is panicking, nobody is surprised -- that's not what you want."

One of the problems may be that so many people are talking capitulation. Everybody is waiting for everybody else to get too scared to hold. Dickey notes that until last year, corrections tended to come in the 10% range. Last year's was about 20%, and he reckons this one might end up around that as well.

"That's not a good sign, when it takes more and more of a decline to get people's attention," he said.

A few people -- most notably Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's Byron Wien -- have lately been saying that that the difference might be that the market won't bounce back like before, that the dip-buying strategy won't work. Somewhat ironically, it may take more people saying such things for the market to have the kind of fear -- where investors are capitulating rather than waiting for everyone else to -- necessary to put in a market bottom.

It's a different kind of market than when Cohen's calls did so much. It takes more than a 10% fall to get people nervous. And that may be why her call today ended up largely ignored...

I have a MONEY magazine from back in 1994 with Ms. Cohen on the cover, along with Ed Yardeni and some other notables, all talking about the good times ahead in 1995. They were right.

Then in 1998, Ed Yardeni started warning people that there might be some very heavy weather ahead due to Y2K and other factors. He stopped being featured much in MONEY, while Ms. Cohen continued to be a cover girl.

Ms. Cohen needs to talk louder, it seems. People are apparently having trouble hearing her pleasing words.

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), October 18, 1999.

At about 2:30 Eastern time, gold at about $311.80, down about $4.6, silver at about $524, down about $9.80. Both are off their lows for today.

Jerry

-- Jerry B (skeptic76@erols.com), October 18, 1999.