World Markets Have a Bad Day

Every now and then you get a significant market correction, and today was the day:

Stocks plummeted Tuesday, briefly hurtling the Dow Jones industrials down nearly 550 points as Wall Street succumbed to a global market plunge sparked by growing concerns that the U.S. and Chinese economies are cooling and that equities prices have become overinflated.

A 9 percent slide in Chinese stocks, which came a day after investors sent Shanghai's benchmark index to a record high close, set the tone for U.S. trading. The Dow began the day falling sharply, and the decline accelerated throughout the course of the session before stocks took a huge plunge in late afternoon as computer-driven sell programs kicked in.

The Dow fell 546.02, or 4.3 percent, to 12,086.06 before recovering some ground in the last hour of trading to close down 415.86, or 3.29 percent, at 12,216.40, according to preliminary calculations. Because the worst of the plunge took place after 2:30 p.m., the New York Stock Exchange's trading limits, designed to halt such precipitous moves, were not activated.

The decline was the Dow's worst since Sept. 17, 2001, the first trading day after the terror attacks, when the blue chips closed down 684.81, or 7.13 percent.

The drop hit every sector of stocks across the market. Riskier issues such as small-cap and technology stocks suffered the biggest declines.

Jim Cramer has some good insights as to just what went wrong. At one point the market went from -280 to -546...in about three minutes. You can watch it happen on this CNBC broadcast:

I heard one report that suggested that a hiccup in the Dow Jones program that tracks the average caused the sudden drop in the numbers. They had been heading down all day, but not that precipitously.

There may be a couple of weak days ahead, but these things tend to turn back around. They did after 9/11 and again after the 500 point drop in September of 1987.