Still, Morris stressed, Citicorp has no intention of pulling back from the region, in which it has been actively involved for 90 years. Today's trading left several equity portfolio managers in a quandary as they tried to assess whether to hunt for bargains or sell to lock in big gains for the year. We're quickly getting to fair value, but I'm not personally ready to put too much money to work. But we're going to keep doing it. We may get no validation on a one-week basis, but three or four months from now it will look like the right thing to have done. . . .
Fear is the natural enemy of sound long-term investing.
David Shulman, chief market strategist at Salomon Brothers Inc., who said in August that stock prices could drop as much as 20 percent, said today that it's too soon to tell whether the selling today and in the past week is the start of a new bear market in the United States or simply a short-term correction. This has been a big hit to investor psychology and a smaller hit to corporate earnings. Christine Callies, chief investment strategist at Credit Suisse First Boston in New York, said she believes the damage from the Asian slowdown can be contained without touching off a bear market in U.S. stocks. With U.S. interest rates declining and the economy still growing, she believes investors will stick with stocks. Richard Bernstein, head of quantitative analysis at Merrill Lynch, said that on a fundamental basis, the drop in U.S. stock prices is overdone.