Last month I was on holiday in India. As I was looking for EOD data for all scripts trading on BSE, I thought what better to look for than the exchange itself. And guess what day I choose to visit the exchange - 21 Jan 2008, the day stock markets melted across the world. I didn't had a clue about the meltdown till I was outside the exchange. People were gathering outside the exhange to witness the stock market melting in front of their eyes.
This was an experience for me. People were frantically calling their brokers to sell and as always the systems went down under heavy load. Towards the end of the day there were rumors even the mobile network was jammed. I did experience some difficulty calling home from my mobile around that period but I thought this was normal.
I was obseving some people's reaction outside the exchange. There were people from all leading news channel interviewing people.Here are few commenst...
The market was down by some 1500 point on that day yet one passer by said "oh don't worry it will recover 1000 point by close" and we were just 30 mins from close.
- "Blame it on goverment for not doing enough to protect the market".
- "Blame it on Reliance IPO". Reliance Power IPO closed on 18th Jan where it was over subscribed by 73 time.
- "This is good time to buy as stocks are very cheap".
The above comments reflects the understanding of an average person about the stock market. Things have changed a lot since I visited India about 4 years back.
I will cover these in my part 2 of this post.
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