AP IMPACT: Another Day - Hardly Ordinary - at NYSE

By the time Jeffrey Frankel got to bed it was past midnight, but sleep did not come easy. Twice during the night, the broker had climbed out from the covers and returned to the television, trying to get a read on what investors were thinking in Tokyo and Hong Kong and to see what the futures market foretold about the trading day ahead.

Traders work, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

(Don Emmert/AFP/Getty)

Now, the digital board hanging over the New York Stock Exchange's maple hardwood floor showed 9:24 a.m.

Six minutes left until the open.

But in one corner of the trading floor, brokers for Stuart Frankel & Co. had been at their stations for more than 2 1/2 hours. Frankel, president of the company founded by his father, had been on the floor since 8, working the phones, swigging coffee, "trying to get ready for what seems to be getting whacked in the head every day."

After weeks of riding the Wall Street whipsaw, this new day — Wednesday, Oct. 29 — held out both reason for hope and the potential for even more pain.

The previous session had ended with an adrenaline-pumping 889-point surge in the Dow Jones industrial average. The gain was welcomed warily on the floor. But it did little to clarify the doubts or ease the fears of the people whose lives and livelihoods are staked to a market down 40 percent from a year ago.

In minutes, the world's investors — from millionaire hedge fund managers to ordinary workers trying to protect decimated retirement savings — would turn their attention to this trading floor, studying the televised frenzy in a search for reassurance and direction.

If they chose, they could look ahead to the promise of a cut in interest rates, likely to be announced at midafternoon. But who could blame them for looking back? This, after all, was the anniversary of the 1929 market crash, perhaps the darkest day in exchange history.

There was only one certainty. This would not be an ordinary day on the floor. There are no ordinary days here anymore.

The electronic board showed investors were betting on stocks to open near the previous day's close, a good sign. Now it was up to Frankel and his trading floor compatriots to figure out whether yesterday's brief exhilaration signaled the edge of the oasis a parched Wall Street had been searching for, or just a cruel mirage.

"That's the million-dollar question," Frankel said.

But for now the only answer was the sound of the opening bell.

———

9:39 a.m., Dow down 88.97.

Traders greet the bell with light applause. But it fades in seconds. Wall Street has plenty to think about today and isn't wasting time on formalities.

Just over an hour ago, it looked like stocks might start the day strong after the Commerce Department reported that orders for products like cars and appliances rose in September.

But that bit of good news doesn't appear to be enough for a market where half of the stock drop has been compressed into just four weeks. After Tuesday's big gain, some investors appear ready to claim a little profit, and it's easy to understand why.

Standing at his booth, broker Theodore Weisberg cranes his neck, peering up at the board. Weisberg sports a tie covered with silhouettes of the Buttonwood Tree, under whose branches 24 traders founded the NYSE in 1792. It's a souvenir of his four decades on the trading floor. But even with that tenure, he acknowledges it's harder than ever to read the market.

"In times like this you need to be more of a psychologist than a trader," he says, "because so much of stock trading is driven by human emotion."

Still, Weisberg likes what he sees. Citigroup stock is holding above $13 a share, a good sign for banking companies beaten down by the financial crisis. Just the fact that the overall market is sustaining most of yesterday's gains is encouraging, he says.

Sure enough, 12 minutes later, and the Dow has narrowed its drop, down just 37. Still, even 40 years of trading can't tell Weisberg whether yesterday's jump and today's steadiness is a sign that battered stocks have bottomed out.