Drama Queens to the Floor, Please

I recognize that it was a dramatic day for some people yesterday (mostly, I expect, the people who had forgotten- or perhaps are too young to have ever seen- what a dramatic correction looks like and those without anything resembling a hedge against dramatically long equity positions) but DealBreaker points us to a bit of dramatic evidence that a few of us are ill-prepared for anything like a dramatic (or, indeed, a moderately dramatic) financial shock.  In response to dramatic fluctuations today in shares of Goldman Sachs (which, do remember dear reader, was trading dramatically between $194 and $210 at the time) one (mercifully, self-preservingly anonymous) floor trader moans:

Goldman fell six bucks. People were going nuts. There were no bids for five or six points. We haven't seen that kind of thing for years. This was no high-flying tech stock. It was Goldman-fucking-Sachs.  For a minute I wondered if they had blown up Broad Street. Maybe Goldman Sachs no longer existed.

A six dollar drop in Goldman?  How perfectly ghastly!  It is positively enough to give a girl the vapours!  I mean really, what can have been expected of you in a moment like that?

One would suppose- erroneously, it would now seem- that those on The Street were made of sterner stuff than this.  The testicles on the famous bull are, after all, made of bronze last I checked- no?  Perhaps, oh, anonymous aspirant to big swinging schmuck status, you better run out and get some duct-tape and plastic sheets for the imminent biological attack, too.  I am certain, however, that once you recover from the shock, say, Friday afternoon or, perhaps, Monday morning, it might be a good time to go long on Anthrax remedies and buy those ethanol stocks "on the dip," right?

Well, I suppose it is for the best.  A 4% correction to wake people up a little might have been a good idea if this is the kind of propensity to lightheadedness that lurks out there.  After all, it could have been something serious.

I should like it quite a bit if we saw some nicely public (but controlled) hedge fund blow ups.  Great time to filter out some of the lightweights and see who was paying attention (or more interestingly, who wasn't).  What faces the U.S. markets today remains to be seen but, I assure you, from the midst of my convalescence here on the other side of the pond and fast in the grips of the warm enveloping anesthetic of my morphine drip machine (yuuuuummmmmy...) I eagerly await the early dispatches- any hint you detect of efforts on my part to avoid looking smug is entirely the result of your overactive imagination.

Oh, and that reminds me.  I think I will cover my Goldman short today.