I would strongly advise the consumption of a very large grain of salt when reading any of these "explanations" of why the market did this or that. This particular one comes from a Reuters wire service report that was being put out around 1800GMT when the Scotsman would have been put to bed. As it happens, the Dow turned round in the last couple of hours and closed only 50 points down, with no very obvious developments in the likelihood of a terrorist attack. No disrespect to the guys at Reuters who write these comments, but it's a bit of a joke; they have to write something to fill the space, but nobody who knows anything will talk to them because anybody who knows anything a) has better things to do than talk to Reuters and b) probably doesn't want the world to know what they're up to.
In general, it is usually vain to try and find reasons for anything happening in the stock market which are located in the world outside the stock market. It really is an amazingly insular place; in six years, the only time I have ever seen people take interest in the outside world was September 11th, and even that was for three or four days max. cheers dd > > Such is the worry of an attack [on Bush during his > state visit to Britain] > that the stock markets in Wall Street and elsewhere > fell sharply, with the > Dow Jones dropping 130 points at one stage and the FTSE > 100 down 58.1 at > 4338.9. > > http://www.news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1272842003
